As a marketer, you need to stay up to date on new advancements that could benefit your company.

You don’t want to be left behind while your competitors forge ahead by adapting to the new world.

In my consulting work, I often see marketers and business owners who don’t believe these advancements are relevant to their marketing strategies. But this couldn’t be farther from the truth. New types of technology such as AI and machine learning are reshaping marketing.

While the technology is advancing rapidly, the basic concepts behind its applications remain unchanged. Everything is still focused on the customer.

Your marketing efforts need to reach your target audience. Your campaigns must find ways to speak to these people, and you can achieve that by personalizing and improving their experience.

Predictive analysis can make this possible.

Some of you may already be running campaigns and have strategies in place that focus on improving the customer experience and personalizing content.

However, predictive analysis technology will bring these ideas to the next level. You’ll see what I mean as I continue.

Surprisingly, only 23% of businesses are currently using advanced and predictive analysis tools:

That said, about 90% of businesses believe it’s at least somewhat important to implement predictive analysis tactics in their strategies.

What does this information tell you?

Well, it seems as though the vast majority of business owners and marketers recognize the need for predictive analysis, but they just haven’t proceeded.

Since you’ve navigated to this guide, I’m assuming you fall into this category. Or maybe you fall into the 16% of marketers currently evaluating advanced analytics software.

People want to use this technology, but they don’t know where to start or how to apply it. This was my inspiration for this guide.

Making the decision to move forward with predictive analysis is the first step.

Now you need to figure out how this technology will improve your marketing strategy. If you apply the concepts I’ve outlined in this guide, you’ll have a huge competitive advantage.

Enhance your customer segmentation strategy

Your customers don’t fall into the same group.

Treating all people the same is not an effective marketing strategy. I hope you’ve already started segmenting your customers.

Marketers have been doing this well before the days of big data. But this can be drastically improved with predictive analysis.

Predictive analysis can make it easier for you to compile demographic data. I’m referring to parameters such as:

age

race

gender

location

Typically, it’s easy to learn this information about your customers. But segmenting them by those factors alone is not enough.

By using predictive analytics technology, you can identify trends for deeper segmentation.

You’ll ultimately pair demographic data with psychographics. This type of information can be obtained from social media, website analytics, surveys, and focus groups.

It doesn’t stop there. You can also collect behavioral data, such as how each customer uniquely uses your service or platform, e.g., your website or mobile app.

When you combine all the demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data about your customers, your predictive analysis model will create segmented groups with greater accuracy than it would if it used only one type of information at a time.

You can create customer personas once the data has been optimized from the predictive analysis formulas:

Once the segments have improved, your customer personas will be more precise and targeted accordingly.

Customer personas and customer segmentation are not quite the same although they’re often confused with each other. Ultimately, the two concepts work together.

With the information you get from your advanced segmentation strategy, you’ll be able to build a customer persona. These personas will be used for driving sales and conversions.

You can eventually use your predictive analysis software to improve lead scoring.

Once someone has been properly segmented, you can send them the right campaign, which will make it easier for them to convert. I’ll discuss lead scoring in greater detail later.

Improve automation

Customer personalization needs to be a key part of your marketing strategy.

But efficiency needs to be a priority as well.

It’s unrealistic for you to manually analyze every customer in your database. Most people leverage basic details with their automated platforms.

They use basic factors, such as the customer’s name, email address, location, and maybe their age.

For example, you could have an automated email go out to a customer on their birthday. This strategy is OK, but it can definitely be improved.

By using your customer segments and customer personas, you’ll be able to have a more advanced automation strategy.

With this type of data, you can create campaigns to show your customers you fully understand their wants and needs. Furthermore, you’ll know how to address those wants and needs.

Once your automation efforts improve, it will be much more profitable for your business.

That’s why such a large majority of marketing executives who have been using predictive analytics to improve their marketing strategies are seeing a high ROI.

If the initial cost of this type of software is holding you back from investing in it, know that you’ll ultimately see a return on your investment.

Reduce churn

When businesses focus only on customer acquisition, allowing their retention strategies to become an afterthought, they underperform.

If this sounds like you, you’re making a big mistake. It’s much easier to sell to your current customers than to new ones.

Those of you with a high churn rate are missing out on much potential income.

If you can reduce your churn, you’ll have more money in your company’s bank account.

Predictive analysis can help show you when a customer will churn based on their behavior. Then, you can have targeted and automated responses in place to prevent that from happening. This will give them an incentive to stay.

You may not realize it today, but your churn rates can be detrimental to your company over time. Just look at this graph:

Notice the difference between the churn rates of 1% and 5%. That’s huge.

Check out the difference between 1% and 2.5%. I’m sure that’s not what you expected, given the small percentage number.

As you can see, improving your churn rate even by a percentage point or two will be a huge advantage for your company. This is especially true as you continue to acquire new customers over time.

Make decisions in real time

With predictive analysis tools, your company can benefit from speeding up the decision-making process.

That’s because you’ll get predictive results in real time.

The longer it takes for you to make a decision based on the information you’re given, the less effective that decision becomes.

Without predictive analysis software, the gap in the analysis latency section is much larger. The gap is the time between when the data is captured and the information is delivered.

Obviously, this delay will make it more difficult for you to act in a timely manner.

Let’s revisit the customer churn problem. If you don’t get that data delivered right away, by the time you attempt to prevent a customer from churning, you might be too late. They already switched to a competitor.

Let’s say they are going on vacation in two weeks. They need that specific product before they go.

If you wait too long to take an action to try to get that sale, you’ll be too late even if you did everything else right.

You identified their need and sent them a personalized, highly targeted campaign. But if that was not done in a timely fashion, it’s useless.

Create advanced regression models

Some of you might be currently using regression models in your marketing strategy.

Predictive analysis will improve this strategy.

Even if you’re not doing this, you can start to do so once you implement predictive analysis software. Regressions can help you measure and compare different variables.

For example, you could try to determine how social engagement relates to your website traffic. Or you could compare email open rates to conversions. And you can relate your page authority to the source of your leads.

Simply put, lifetime value will show you how much a customer is worth over time.

From the very beginning stages of the customer journey, predictive analysis can help identify which customers will be the most profitable.

Segmenting those people accordingly will improve your targeting strategies. Now, you’ll be able to make even more money from your most profitable customers.

Furthermore, LTV will also help you calculate a more accurate ROI of your marketing campaigns.

I see companies make this mistake all the time. They stay away from certain acquisition strategies because they can’t justify the cost.

But that’s because they don’t measure LTV, or at least they’re not doing it accurately.

You need to look beyond the customer’s initial first purchase. Here’s a very simple example.

Let’s say it costs you $50 to acquire a customer based on the campaigns you’re running, but their average purchase is $20. It doesn’t mean you need to abandon those strategies—not if the lifetime value of that customer is $1,000.

Predictive analysis will make these figures much more accurate.

Prioritize qualified leads

You might be getting a ton of leads right now, but not all of them are qualified.

Qualified leads are more likely to convert, and you need to prioritize them.

But if you allow those leads to get lost in the shuffle, you won’t capitalize on them.

I mentioned lead scoring earlier. Based on your predictive analysis, you can improve your lead scoring system. If you don’t currently have a lead scoring system in place, this will be a great opportunity for you to create one.

By applying predictive analysis to your lead scoring system and qualifying your leads, you will accelerate new leads through the conversion funnel. Ultimately, more conversions translate to more money.

Give users a reason to end their free trials early

Here’s something else I see all too often with subscription businesses. They wait until the trial ends before trying to get users to convert.

By that point, it’s too late.

For example, let’s say you offer a 14-day free trial. Once the trial expires, you give the user some buffer time to decide whether they want to become a paying customer.

A week later, you send an email with a CTA to a paid subscription link.

If this sounds like a strategy you’re currently using, it’s probably why your conversions are so low. Waiting this long is not a good idea. By this point, your service is no longer on the minds of the consumers.

They’ve already gone a week without using it and realized it’s not something they need in their lives.

Instead of waiting until the trial is over, you can give the user an incentive to sign up while their trial is still going on.

But why would anyone want to end their free trial early? You need to make them an offer that’s worth it.

Discounts and other promotions will usually get the job done. Here’s a great example from 500px:

500px is offering 15% off its membership, plus additional account upgrades. However, this promotion won’t last long. As you can see from the highlighted bit, this offer lasted for only 24 hours.

Put yourself in the shoes of the consumer for a minute here. Let’s say they are on day 22 of a 30-day trial.

They like the product and are thinking about upgrading when the trial expires.

But why would they wait and pay the full price when they can get 15% off today? This type of offer gives them a reason to end their trial early and convert.

You want to target these users while they’re still hooked and your brand is fresh in their minds. If you give them an incentive to end the trial early, you’ll increase the chances of them becoming a paying customer.

Offer trial extensions

What happens if a user doesn’t take the bait of the incentive to end their trial early?

Does that mean you should give up on trying to get them to convert? Absolutely not.

Some people may need a bit more time to determine whether they want to use your product. Here’s what I mean.

Let’s say someone signs up for a free trial. The process was simple and hassle-free, so they completed this action without thinking twice about it.

But because of their circumstances, they didn’t get a chance to explore your product in full.

There are a number of different reasons for this. It’s possible they were busy at work, had a medical issue, were traveling, or simply forgot about the trial.

The reason why they need more time isn’t important. What is important is giving them the option to extend their trial.

Don’t forget to contact your current customers when their payment methods don’t work anymore.

Leverage your email marketing strategy to nurture leads and free trial users. If you follow the tips I’ve outlined in this guide, you’ll have a much easier time getting free trial and free plan users to convert.

How are you encouraging free trial and free plan users to upgrade to paid memberships?

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Free web hosting only makes sense for a pretty narrow scope of customers: those who have small websites without much content and very little traffic, and those who have temporary websites, like for an upcoming event. If that’s you:

For pretty much everything else — especially a small business or an online presence you’re looking to grow, we recommend paying for hosting to get increased functionality, more reliability, and better customer support. You won’t be spending all that much. Some of the best web hosting services start for as little as $4/month.

Hands-down the easiest way for most people to get a website up and running is a website builder, where you can drag-and-drop content blocks and tinker around with customizable templates. Most website builders are only free if you use a subdomain (for example, our URL on a Wix subdomain would look like: quicksprout.wix.com), which is a dealbreaker for anyone who wants to run a professional-looking site. We talk more about free hosting using a subdomain here.

However, there are two builders that host websites for free and connect to a custom domain. They are super simple and have limited functionality — but since super simple, limited websites are the only ones we recommend to hosting for free, it makes a lot of sense to start there.

Ucraft Review

Ucraft has a free plan for a single-page website that’s built with what it calls “elements.” An element is any individual piece of content: a title, a text block, a video, an image, an image gallery, a button. Ucraft’s free tier supports up to 50 basic elements, so that single-page website can hold a decent amount of content — just nothing too snazzy.

Upgrade for unlimited pages, more customization, and no ads for $6/month

Ecommerce functionality starts at $14/month

Six of Ucraft’s 21 free templates, including a blank page for a completely customized site.

A “Powered by UCRAFT” ad hovers in the bottom right corner of all free Ucraft websites.

Google Sites Review

Google Sites is your other option for a super simple free site. And when we say “super simple,” we mean it. There are only six versions of the same template to choose from, and a limited number of layouts to work in. It’s super basic. In fact, lots of Google Sites are used for basic things like internal wikis.

Google Sites offers one basic template in six simple themes.

That said, Google Sites hosts as many pages as you want at no cost. It connects to your custom domain. It integrates with every other Google service, like Docs, Forms, and Slides. And it’s absurdly simple to use, especially if you’re used to working in Google products. If you already have a Google account, or are paying for GSuite for email hosting (which we wholeheartedly recommend), it’s a no-brainer.

Drag-and-drop builder, plus limited customizable themes

Unlimited storage

Supports custom domain

Google Sites ad in footer

Integrates with GMail

There are no upgrade options — this is everything

Want more design freedom? You’ll need web hosting.

Design limitations are probably the biggest downside to using a free website builder. If the templates available on Ucraft and Google Sites aren’t what you’ve envisioned for your site, the next easiest free option is to find a free template you like and pair it with a free web host.

That said, there are plenty of downsides to free web hosting. To make our recommendations, we took the following six criteria into consideration.

Ads: Some free web hosts stay afloat by selling ad space. We wanted to avoid those providers — no one wants random ads appearing in the middle of their content — and opted for hosts that support their free tier from sales of their paid hosting plans.

Email hosting: Our recommendations offer at least one custom email address and free email hosting since that is one of the glaring things lacking from a free website builder. (Ucraft doesn’t offer email hosting at all and Google Sites only offers a custom email address if you pay $5/month for GSuite.) An email that’s attached to your website and domain name is great to have for one-off correspondences (plus looks pro on a business card), and a free web host provider’s email hosting is perfect for that.But be warned, your legit emails may be flagged as spam. Why? Free hosting is a hotbed for less-than-savory online activity, and your site might get lumped into a server of bad actors. In other words: spam filter activated. If you’re going to use your email a lot or for anything important — say for sending out a newsletter or for marketing promotions — we recommend upgrading to email hosting through a service like GSuite or even a domain registrar like Namecheap, which sells email hosting starting at $10/year.

Storage and bandwidth: Free web hosting has famously low limits for both disk space and bandwidth. If you go over your limit, your site may get suspended or you may be automatically upgraded to a paid service. Even when providers like Byethost offer unlimited bandwidth and storage, it’s not infinite. Just like with a paid service, unlimited storage and bandwidth only last until you start negatively impacting the other sites on your server — and all hosts are extremely vague about how much traffic or storage is too much traffic or storage. Have a negative impact and your site may still be suspended or auto-upgraded.

PHP and MySQL: PHP is one of the most popular programming languages. It’s what apps like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal run on, and therefore what a lot of websites use. MySQL are databases those apps store information on. Your web host needs to support up-to-date versions of both. The problem: Most hosts don’t disclose the exact version of the PHP or MySQL they run. And even if these apps do work, there is a high likelihood that with any free host they are going to load slowly — a PHP application requires a lot more lift from what is probably an extremely burdened server. If you’re worried at all about page load time (and you should be — Google takes it into account), we recommend limiting anything you build on a free host to a simple static HTML/CSS site.

Recommended PHP

Lowest supported PHP

Recommended MySQL

Lowest supported MySQL

WordPress

7.2+

5.2.4+

5.6+

5.0+

Joomla

5.6 or 7.0+

5.3.10+

5.5.3+

5.1+

Drupal

7.2+

5.5.9+

5.5.3

5.5.3

Another thing to keep in mind is database limitations. Every piece of software you want to use on your site requires a database to store its information. If you are running WordPress, it needs a database. If you’re running another app, it’s going to need its own database. Most free hosts impose a limit on the number of databases your site can access, and the amount of storage available in that database.

SSL certificate: Secure Sockets Layer encryption is what confirms a website is secure enough to receive sensitive data like credit card data and passwords. SSL certificates are the only way a site can do any sort of ecommerce at all, but Google also considers it a factor for where any site, ecomm or not, shows up in search rankings. Most free web hosts don’t offer a free SSL certificate; the ones that do tend to offer a “self-signed” SSL. Self-signed SSLs are issued by servers, not by a certificate authority (Comodo, Digicert, Let’s Encrypt, etc). They offer the same level of encryption, but it’s not the standard version, so web browsers will still flag your site and issue a security warning to visitors.

A warning like this one from Mozilla will still pop up with a self-signed SSL certificate.

Customer support: With any free host customer support is going to be limited, slow to respond, and not all that helpful. That’s just the way it is.

A note on custom domain names and domain privacy: You can host a site with a custom domain for free, but you’re still going to have to purchase the domain name through a domain registrar. Lots of hosting providers have a domain registration arm of their business, but you can also purchase a domain anywhere and connect it to your free web host. No matter what, we recommend also springing for domain privacy, which keeps your personal information (including your phone number and physical address) from being listed on the WHOIS public database. Opt-out, you’ll be spammed like crazy — at least for now. (Since the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in May 2018, domain registrars are “refraining from publishing this information” to avoid liability. Others are retracting information to avoid accusations of selling information to spammers.)

Our picks: the 5 best free web hosts

Awardspace is a big player in the free hosting space and has been around for more than a decade. It stands out for offering a full gig of storage, more than many others, and, according to a friendly sales rep we chatted with, up-to-date versions of PHP and MySQL. It also offers the Zacky drag-and-drop website builder, plus an easy-to-use WordPress and Joomla installer. Note: If your site receives no traffic for 12 months, it will automatically be set to inactive; after two more weeks of notices, it will be deleted.

Number of sites: 1

Storage: 1GB

Bandwidth: 5GB

PHP version: 7.2

MySQL version: 5.7

Database storage: 30MB

Number of email accounts: 1

Customer support: Limited ticketing, live chat, online documentation

No ads: Yes

SSL: No

Domain registration: Yes

Atspace has nearly identical stats to Awardspace, with the exception of unlimited bandwidth (as opposed to Awardspace’s 5GB) and a claim of 24/7/365 support. (Digging deeper, though, Atspace lists that support as “limited 24/7/365 support” so take that with a big fat grain of salt.) Atspace also uses the Zacky website builder and app installer for apps like WordPress and Joomla.

Freehostia offers free cloud hosting on its Chocolate plan (your guess is as good as ours). That means it should be fast, but the Chocolate plan is also very small: only 250MB of disk space and 10MB of database storage. That said, it does include a free self-signed SSL certificate, a site builder with free templates, and the promise of a response to help tickets in under one hour — pretty much unheard of. If you have a small enough site, the customer service promise alone makes Freehostia a compelling pick.

Agilityhoster’s free tier is slightly smaller than what’s offered from Awardspace and Atspace: only 1000MB of storage and one 20MB MySQL database. It also lacks any sort of website builder, although it does have a simple WordPress and Joomla installer to get you up and running quickly. A sales rep confirmed that it runs up-to-date PHP and MySQL.

Byethost is by far the most generous free web host with unlimited sites, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, and five email accounts. It also provides an automatic SSL on all domains, and includes a free site builder with templates. That said, Byethost is one of the least professional-looking hosts we looked at, with a poorly written website and enough vagueness that we wonder how unlimited its unlimited offerings actually are. Unless you think you need a lot of database space, we recommend going with a different free host.

Selling products through a website that’s hosted for free isn’t easy. Most don’t support the functionality, and when they do, the experience is pretty limited. We were excited to find Strikingly, a website builder that also offers built-in ecommerce on its free plan. The catch? You’ll be limited to selling one single product.

Free online stores are a little easier to come by. (The difference? Online stores are just the stores, without the bells and whistles of a full-fledged website. That means no blog, no additional content — just products.)

The 2 free online stores we recommend: Square and Ecwid.

Square is a powerhouse business that was originally best known for its point-of-sell credit card swipers found at every farmers market and craft fair. We like its free online store that hosts unlimited products and has decent functionality.

Drag-and-drop editor, plus four customizable themes

Supports custom domain name

Transaction fee: 2.9% + $0.30

Square offers four customizable templates for its free online stores.

Ecwid is a really interesting option. While it offers a free online store like Square (Ecwid calls it a “Starter Site’), Ecwid also offers a free online store widget, with code you can insert into pretty much any platform your site is on, from Wix to WordPress to Tumblr, just like you’d insert a YouTube video. That widget also means you sell simultaneously on multiple sites.

Free Web Hosting Alternatives

If you’re okay with a subdomain (as opposed to a custom domain) your options for excellent free hosting increase.

That’s because lots of great website builders offer freemium versions of their platforms when you use a subdomain — for example, our URL would be quicksprout.wordpress.com or quicksprout.wix.com.

Obviously, a subdomain lacks the professionalism of a custom domain, and free versions of any website builder product or platform tend to be pretty stripped down. But if you’re interested in launching content quickly, subdomains offer a really low barrier of entry. Most can launch in just a few minutes. Even better, if you envision a more robust web presence in the future, starting for free on the platform you ultimately want to use means you’ll have everything already built. You’ll just need to upgrade.

At the free level, these 3 are pretty comparable. They’ve all got an assortment of free templates or themes, an easy-to-use editor, limited storage, and ads for their service floating near the footer or in a bottom corner of the site. If you may eventually upgrade to a paid plan, check out our forthcoming review of website builders (to be published later this month!). We’ll go into a lot more detail than we do here.

Free web hosting for nonprofits and educators

There are excellent — and extremely robust — free hosting options available for nonprofits and educators. These typically aren’t stripped-down versions, but full-blown shared hosting plans that are available for free, including custom domains, full technical functionality, and attentive customer support.

Dreamhost is a really big name in web hosting. It’s one of our top picks for best web hosts for small businesses and is one of three recommended hosts by WordPress itself. Dreamhost offers one free Unlimited shared hosting plan (which includes email hosting) for 501(c)(3) organizations, plus a 35% discount on its suped-up DreamPress managed WordPress hosting. Both are killer deals. Most of the other free web hosts for nonprofits don’t have nearly as strong of reputations, nor offer as robust free plans. This plan has unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, and you can host an unlimited number of sites.

5 other free web hosts for nonprofits to consider

A Small Orange: Free month-to-month “Small Shared Plan” for business that pass A Small Orange’s “criteria.” You’ll get 50GB bandwidth, 5GB storage, and can host an unlimited number of sites.

Free web hosting for educators

Some of our favorite web hosts provide free or deeply discounted services for teachers and university administrators.

SiteGround, our pick for best web host, has some of the most robust shared hosting technology available — and arguably the best reputation in an industry of hundreds. SiteGround offers all the features and functionality of its StartUp Plan (including 24/7 support on chat, phone and ticket) to teachers for free with a SiteGround subdomain. SiteGround also discounts its hosting for students.

Weebly has a eductor-focused arm of its website builder business. It works just like Weebly for any small business or personal website, but is geared for educators. The edu-version of Weebly gives the option of publishing content to a custom domain, not a Weebly subdomain. It also skips all Weebly advertising.

Drag-and-drop editor, plus templates

Unlimited bandwidth

Unlimited storage

Includes 40 student accounts

If you like the sound of Weebly and a website builder, check out WordPress’s version, Edublogs. Similarly, it offers an ad-free environment with class and student management functionality, edu-focused plugins, and an Edublog subdomain.

Recap: The Best Free Web Hosting

If you’re after free web hosting, you might really want the simplicity and ease of a free website builder. We’re impressed with both Ucraft and Google Sites which provide easy to use drag-and-drop templates and support custom domains. Yes, you’ll be limited in design and there will be some sort of “Powered by” ad in the footer on both. If those are deal-breakers, you probably do want web hosting.

Any free host will all have similar drawbacks: limited storage and bandwidth, potential for spam-flagging email, and limited customer support. Go with Awardspace for more storage (1GB), Atspace for 24/7/365 help, or Freehostia if your site is really small (under 250MB).

If you’re an educator or nonprofit, you have a lot more — and better — options.SiteGround and InMotion Hosting, two of our very favorite web hosts, have excellent free plans for educators. So does website builder Weebly. And Dreamhost, another of our favorite web hosts, doesn’t charge nonprofits for one free Unlimited shared hosting plan.

Each day, 3.5 billion searches are performed on Google. That’s more than 1.2 trillion searches annually.

With so many people using Google to search for information online, it’s more important than ever for businesses to understand the Google algorithm. That knowledge will help them use SEO tactics to drive ecommerce sales.

But Google is much more than just a search engine. The Google Play Store is the official app store for all Android devices. It’s developed, owned, and operated by Google.

While you may know how important Google is for searches, you might not be aware of everything else it has to offer.

Google has tons of free tools available for people to take advantage of. As a business owner, you can use these resources to improve your marketing efforts.

I’ve narrowed down the top 15 free Google tools your business can use for marketing. Here they are.

1. Google Drive

Some of you might already be familiar with Google Drive. Maybe you’re using it in your personal life.

But you can use Google Drive to help you with your business as well.

It’s a great way to safely store all your marketing content in the cloud.

You can stay organized and know you can access all your documents and pictures from anywhere. This is much more effective than storing important files directly on your device or an external hard drive.

Unlike hardware that can be lost or destroyed, Google Drive is immune to accidental damages, fires, floods, and theft.

One of my favorite parts about Google Drive is the ability to access my content from anywhere, as long as there is Internet.

You can download the mobile app to manage your files on the go as well.

In addition to using Google Drive for storage, I use Google Docs and Google Sheets to work on content directly.

I’m sure at one point or another, you’ve lost work you were doing in Microsoft Word or Excel. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking that software. I’m just saying I’ve never had an issue when working or saving content in Google Drive.

I use it to store photos as well.

If I come across an interesting or informative photo I plan to use on one of my websites, YouTube channel, or blog posts, I save it to the respective file in my drive.

If you are sharing content and collaborating with your team, you can share files with specific users. Set parameters giving them the ability to view, share, or edit the content.

The first 15GB of Google Drive storage are free.

You can upgrade to 100GB for just $1.99 per month. I can’t imagine you’ll need much more than that.

2. Google Alerts

Just as the name implies, Google Alerts will notify you about anything you create an alert for.

For example, let’s say you want to know anytime someone mentions your business online. Set up an alert, and you’ll be emailed as soon as something gets published.

Then, you can act if you see negative information posted about your brand on the web.

4. Google Analytics

You can learn more about your website visitors. Google Analytics will show you the demographics of anyone who navigates to your site.

This will give you a much better understanding of your target audience and whether your marketing efforts are appealing to the right group of people.

Find out the locations of these users and what language they speak.

Discover what technology they’re using. Google Analytics will show you the operating systems and web browsers they use. This tool will even tell you what percentage of your traffic is coming from mobile devices.

You’ll also learn the source of your traffic.

You’ll be able to see whether people came from a website, social media network, or search engine. You’ll also see the keywords they searched for.

Google Analytics will give you a clear understanding of your top content and help you determine whether your traffic is converting.

11. Google Content Experiments

As the name implies, it allows you to run experiments on different types of content.

This is a great tool for your marketing campaigns. You can run different variations of the same ad or promotion and get a report to see which one has the highest performance.

Then you can use the top ad for future campaigns and make adjustments to the ones that didn’t perform as well.

You start each experiment by selecting a goal. This helps the tool adjust the metrics accordingly based on what you want to accomplish.

The tool gives you the option to test up to ten variations of a specific landing page, so you’ll be certain that your final experiment results are as accurate as possible.

12. Google Trends

As a marketer, you need to keep your finger on the pulse. You’ve got to stay informed about what’s happening in the world around you.

Watch local and global news. Stay up to date on pop culture.

If you know what’s happening, you can come up with appropriate marketing strategies based on these trends.

But it can be difficult to do this when you’re busy at work every day. Google Trends will make this process much easier for you.

See the hottest searched topics locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally.

Search for a specific topic, such as your industry, to see how popular it is over a certain time period.

If you know what people are searching for, it will be easier for your brand to stay relevant. You can use pop culture trends or global news to create a targeted ad or promotion on social media that will gain lots of attention.

13. Google AdSense

Google AdSense is free to use. In fact, you’ll get paid to participate.

Unlike the other advertising tools on this list, Google AdSense lets you run ads from other businesses on your own website.

Google makes sure that the ads meet a certain quality standard and that they’re relevant to your audience.

If you don’t like an ad displayed on your site, it’s no problem. Simply block any ads you don’t want to appear, and customize the type and location on your site that works best for your needs.

To get the most money for your ad space, Google AdSense will ensure that only the highest bids go live on your site so you can make as much money as possible.

It’s a nice way to make some extra cash while you focus on your other marketing strategies.

14. Google Blogger

If you’ve been reading my content for a while now, you know how much emphasis I put on the benefits of blogging.

Those of you who are not taking advantage of this effective marketing tactic need to start right away.

Google Blogger gives you a free domain to host your blog. While the majority of you will want your blog to be directly on your website, this is an option for newer businesses or for those trying to establish a personal brand that’s separate from your existing company.

You can use this new domain to promote your company website.

It’s easy to integrate your new blog with Google AdSense, which I just talked about.

Like I said, for the most part, you’ll want to have a blog on your company website. But Google Blogger shouldn’t be dismissed. It’s worth a spot on this list.

15. Google Voice

Google Voice gives you the option to stay in touch with your customers from any screen.

You can send and receive calls or texts from your phone, desktop, or tablet.

Unlike a cell phone number or landline for your business, Google Voice is free.

Google Voice also allows you to select a virtual number from nearly any area code, which is great if you’re targeting clients from a specific location.

Your leads will be more likely to trust a local number than just some random out of area caller.

The virtual number can be connected to any mobile device or landline. It’s easy to handle incoming calls from different locations. Anyone with access can answer the phone.

If you have team members in different areas, they all have the option to respond to an incoming call.

Ultimately, Google Voice is great for enhancing your customer service and communication. If you’re not satisfied with your current phone situation, it’s worth looking into this tool.

Conclusion

Google is more than just the global search engine king.

It has a wide range of free tools available to business owners who want to make improvements to their marketing efforts.

Not all of these tools are for everyone. Some of you may not need all 15 of these.

But regardless of your situation, I recommend referring to this list and checking out tools that fit your needs.

There is no risk in trying them out. After all, they’re free to use.

Which free Google tools is your company using to improve its marketing efforts?

]]>http://www.quicksprout.com/2018/11/09/15-free-google-tools-that-will-enhance-your-marketing-strategy/feed/61http://www.quicksprout.com/2018/11/09/15-free-google-tools-that-will-enhance-your-marketing-strategy/How Topic Clusters Are Revolutionizing the Future of Marketinghttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/EvjehXw2s_Q/
http://www.quicksprout.com/2018/11/09/how-topic-clusters-are-revolutionizing-the-future-of-marketing/#commentsMon, 12 Nov 2018 16:00:56 +0000https://www.quicksprout.com/?p=41604[click to continue...]]]>To survive in today’s competitive digital landscape, businesses need to focus on their content strategies now more than ever.

You need to understand how your target audience consumes content and figure out what they’re looking for. It’s not effective to produce random content at a high rate if it’s not valuable.

Everything you publish across all your distribution channels needs to benefit your audience, or it won’t be successful.

In addition to producing high quality content, you also want to make sure it’s SEO-friendly.

The key factor of your content production needs to be relevancy: 78% of consumers say relevant content increases their intent to buy.

Your content must be relevant to your brand and relevant to your audience while still appealing to Google.

Blindly producing content without a strategy won’t help you. You need to keep up with the latest trends and see how other brands approach content marketing and SEO.

Today, and in the future, marketers must have a content strategy compatible with the way people discover new content. Creating content that doesn’t drive results is expensive and inefficient.

That’s why you need to get familiar with topic clusters.

Surprisingly, many business owners and marketers I’ve spoken to recently don’t know anything about this. That was my inspiration for writing this guide.

This is the perfect opportunity for you to gain a competitive advantage.

You can learn how to implement topic clusters today and use this tactic moving forward before your competitors have a chance to catch on.

As a result, you’ll be able to produce high quality engaging content. This will help you improve your SEO strategy, drive more traffic to your site, and increase conversion rates.

I’ll explain everything you need to know about topic clusters and how they are revolutionizing the marketing industry.

What are topic clusters?

Before we proceed, let’s start with the basics.

You may have heard that topic clusters are the future of content marketing and SEO strategies, but that doesn’t explain what they are.

Truthfully, this isn’t a very complex topic. If you guessed what a topic cluster is just based on its name, you probably wouldn’t be far off.

The idea here is you want to create a deeper penetration of certain subjects relevant to your brand, audience, and search engines.

Start with one basic topic, then branch off to similar ones. You’ll create content about all of them, with the main area of focus as the nucleus.

The image above refers to them as core topics and subtopics. However, they are also commonly referred to as pillar content and cluster content.

Your pillar topics will be broad. The clusters will be more descriptive.

For example, let’s say your company sells workout supplements. You can create a topic cluster using “workout routines” as the pillar.

Clusters related to this pillar would be:

home workout routines

workout routines to build muscle

workout routines to lose weight

outdoor workout routines

bodyweight workout routines

workout routines with weights

Each cluster takes a keyword and transforms it into a long-tail keyword.

When you publish such content on your website, you’ll be able to generate lots of internal links, ultimately improving your SEO ranking.

The pillar will link to each cluster, and each cluster will link back to the pillar with internal hyperlinks.

Here’s another example of a topic cluster using “GDPR Compliance” as the pillar:

As you can see, each cluster includes the pillar.

All of these subtopics are more specific segments of the broad subject. That’s how your audience will search for topics online. These topic clusters will increase your site visibility in search engine results.

Optimize your website architecture

The application of your topic clusters will be related to your site architecture.

You need to make sure this structure is optimized for SEO purposes. Whether you realize it or not, how you design your architecture can determine whether your site is SEO-friendly or not.

You need to think about the user experience.

Make it as easy as possible for website visitors to navigate your site and find what they’re looking for in as few steps as possible.

If your site is structured properly, you won’t have as many bounce rates, and your dwell time will be improved as well. As a result, your search ranking will increase.

Let me show you what I mean.

If you Google Quick Sprout, here is how it appears in the search results:

Check out the section I highlighted above. These are called sitelinks.

Sitelinks are subpages of a website that appear in Google SERPs. This will help a user navigate to a more relevant portion of a site, directly from the search engine.

These sitelinks create fewer steps in the conversion funnel. Users can click one of these hyperlinks instead of having to navigate to your homepage first.

Sitelinks are great for SEO purposes. However, you can’t contact Google and choose which site links get displayed unless you’re running paid campaigns with Google AdWords.

For organic search results, Google’s algorithm decides what to display. Your site structure will have a major impact on this.

You need to establish a logical hierarchy of pages and links on your site. Topic clusters will drastically improve these efforts.

Create landing pages that would be available in the learning center or resources section of your site. Something like this could be used as a hub for pillar content. You’ll use that to link to supporting clusters.

Write blog posts. Produce videos. Build infographics.

All of these will help you create more relevant content geared toward the specific needs of your target audience.

If you can’t do this effectively, your audience won’t find your content useful.

This will defeat the whole purpose of your strategy. That’s why I’ve emphasized the importance of high quality content throughout this post.

Build your pillar pages

Once all your content has been produced, it’s time to publish everything.

Start by building your pillar pages. This will be the main spot where you’ll link to the supporting clusters.

Believe it or not, this seemingly simple question puzzles many marketers and business owners I work with.

You’re running ads, and customers are buying what you’re selling, so your marketing efforts must be working, right? Not necessarily.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying this means your strategies have failed. In fact, some of your campaigns may be working great. But you can’t make any assumptions.

The only way to know for sure whether your campaigns are working is to measure the results.

By tracking certain metrics, you’ll also be able to save some money. You don’t want to dump money into campaigns that aren’t working.

Here’s the problem. Sometimes it’s difficult to directly tie one promotion to a sale.

That’s why you need to track several metrics and infer based on the results.

This statement holds true for all marketers, regardless of your industry or the size of your business. It doesn’t matter if you’re running expensive campaigns or using tactics to market your company on a budget. You need to track the results.

As I’m sure you know, there are dozens of business metrics you could be tracking. But not all of these will benefit your marketing strategy.

That was my inspiration for this guide. I narrowed down the top 11 metrics every marketing manager needs to track to be successful.

Use this guide as a reference to measure the success of your marketing campaigns moving forward. Based on the results, you’ll be able to tell what’s working and which strategies need improvement.

1. Average order value

The average order value, or AOV, is one of the first things you need to prioritize as a marketing manager.

You don’t need to look at it every day or after each campaign. AOV is a metric that you need to keep an eye on over time.

If it rises at certain times, you could potentially connect it to campaigns run during that time.

But if it falls, you’re obviously doing something you want to avoid. These issues need to be addressed.

In my consulting work, I see many businesses using only their number of transactions to gauge success. Is it great to make 100 sales in a day? It depends.

I’d rather make 50 sales for $2,500 than 100 sales for $1,000. Or even better, 100 sales for $6,000.

Do you see the difference? That’s where average order value comes into play.

You want to try to get as much money as possible from your existing customers. To do this, you’ll want to encourage them to add more items to their carts or buy other products of higher values.

Both of these will increase your AOV.

2. Customer lifetime value

The concept behind customer lifetime value is simple.

This metric will tell you the amount of money a customer will spend before leaving your business. Here is the formula to calculate it:

Customers who stay with your business for a long time become more profitable.

As a marketer, you need to make sure the lifetime value of your customers is as high as possible.

The best way to do this is by focusing on customer retention as opposed to customer acquisition, which I’ll talk about in greater detail shortly.

Yes, you want new customers. But it’s easier to market to people already familiar with your brand, products, and services.

Research shows that your existing customers will spend 67% more than new customers. This will also increase your average order value, which I just talked about.

Keep in mind customer lifetime value when thinking about your acquisition strategies as well. All too often I see businesses make the mistake of shying away from certain strategies because they don’t seem profitable.

But that’s only because they’re using the AOV to make this decision. If the AOV is less than the acquisition cost, they won’t use that acquisition strategy.

However, they’re not accounting for how much that customer will spend over time. That’s why this metric is so important to track.

Similar to sales conversions, your cart abandonment rate may not be a marketing issue.

There could be a problem with your site. But you don’t want to let your marketing efforts go to waste.

Change your promotions if you have to.

As you can see, high extra costs ranked first on the list of reasons for cart abandonment. Don’t charge your customers for shipping, and highlight that in your marketing campaigns.

You’re doing a great job of getting people to visit your site and add items to their carts. Now you just need them to convert.

5. Revenue by reference source

So, you’ve got lots of website traffic. But where is it coming from?

By tracking the revenue by referral source, you’ll be able to determine which channels are the most profitable for your business.

This is important for both B2C and B2B companies. Here’s a look at the top channels for leads and revenue on the B2B side:

You might be getting tons of traffic from one source, but if you’re not making money from those leads, you need to reevaluate your strategy.

On the flip side, maybe traffic from a certain source is not high, but the revenue from that channel is the highest.

You need to figure out how to get more traffic from your marketing channels yielding the highest revenue. At the same time, you must learn how to increase conversions and the AOV from your distribution channels resulting in the most traffic to your site.

6. Social media engagement

I’m sure social media is a huge part of your company’s marketing strategy, as it should be.

You’re posting content on all your social channels each day. That’s great. But how effective are those posts?

Customer acquisition cost is crucial for all businesses, but it’s especially important for startup companies.

Those of you with a newer company know what it’s like to have to manage a tight budget. Simply put, if your acquisition costs get too high, you’ll run out of money before you have enough customers to give you a sustainable income.

Lower acquisition costs will result in a higher ROI for your marketing efforts and make it easier for your brand to grow exponentially over time.

10. Keywords that drive traffic

Marketing managers need to prioritize SEO.

You can’t just rely on traffic coming from your distribution channels and people navigating directly to your website. Your company needs to be visible and have a high ranking through organic search results as well.

Furthermore, 39% of marketers said they planned to increase their influencer marketing budget in 2018.

And 90% of these marketers say they use engagement metrics to determine the success of their influencer campaigns. I talked about the importance of tracking engagement earlier.

Basically, you need to find out whether the money spent on influencers is generating a return on your investment.

One of the best ways to do this is by giving each influencer a unique promo code. It will make it easier for you to track which influencers are driving the most sales.

You need to cut ties with influencers who aren’t profitable and continue working with the ones driving traffic and revenue to your site. But the only way to determine this is by tracking the ROI of each campaign.

Conclusion

Nobody said being a marketing manager would be easy. Anyone could just throw together a campaign and run it.

Some of these metrics will be specific to individual campaigns, while others should be tracked over time to help you identify patterns.

I’m confident your marketing efforts will improve and you’ll see higher profits once you start tracking these 11 metrics.

What metrics are you using to track the success of your marketing campaigns?

]]>http://www.quicksprout.com/2018/11/06/11-metrics-every-marketing-manager-needs-to-track/feed/55http://www.quicksprout.com/2018/11/06/11-metrics-every-marketing-manager-needs-to-track/B2B Marketers’ AI Expectations 2018-19http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/YDEQu_gTXIw/
http://www.quicksprout.com/2018/11/04/b2b-marketers-ai-expectations-2018-19/#commentsWed, 07 Nov 2018 16:00:28 +0000https://www.quicksprout.com/?p=41471[click to continue...]]]>Artificial intelligence has created a lot of buzz lately, and for good reasons.

Whether your company has adapted or not, this technology has already penetrated our world. Marketers are using AI to improve their businesses.

I know what some of you are thinking. Sure, some companies use AI, but you don’t need to yet, right? Wrong.

I see this mentality far too often when I’m working with business owners.

Even though the majority of these marketing executives know how much of an impact AI will have on their industries, only 26% of respondents say they are confident in their abilities to use AI for marketing.

Now, I’ll explain what B2B marketers are expecting from AI as we close out 2018 and enter 2019. You can find ways to leverage AI by applying the same strategies in your own business.

Anticipate prospective customers

Artificial intelligence makes it much easier for businesses to collect data.

As we continue through this guide, you’ll see multiple examples of how this information can be put to use.

With B2B marketing, it’s not always easy to find new customers. That’s because your target market is much more specific than that of most B2C companies.

Even if you’ve identified the types of businesses you want to target, you may not always be able to find them.

Plus, if you find a potential client, they may not be currently in the market for your products, services, or solutions. Maybe they already have existing relationships with another vendor they’re unwilling to break, or their budget could be too tight to afford what you’re offering.

I’m sure every phone call you make and every door you knock on doesn’t land you a customer overnight.

I am sure you can relate to this struggle as a B2B marketer. That’s where AI comes into play.

As a result, your marketing efforts will be much more efficient. Using these prediction models will increase your chances of getting a potential customer to convert because you’ll be aiming at qualified leads.

These are B2B consumers who have a need for what you’re offering and have the ability to pay for it as well.

If you want to take advantage of it, you should check out Zilliant. What separates Zilliant from other AI solutions is this software is specifically designed for B2B marketers.

Distinguish visitors from buyers

I’m sure you’re closely monitoring your website traffic. But you can’t assume that everyone who lands on your website is a customer or prospective customer.

AI will help you tell the difference between actual customers and people who are just visiting your site. You can target those people accordingly.

By anticipating prospective customers, which I previously discussed, you can tell whether a site visitor has buying potential or if they are navigating to your site for another reason.

AI software can monitor browsing behavior to tell you which category each unique visitor falls into.

If someone, who is not a B2B buyer, visits your site after finding you from an organic search, you don’t want to waste your marketing efforts targeting that person.

If you’re running banner ads on third-party sites by using cookies to target anyone who ever visited your site, those impressions are a waste of money if they’re seen by an irrelevant audience.

On the other hand, you can’t assume that those who didn’t convert on your website are not qualified leads.

Other factors could have prevented a visitor from converting. Take a look at the top pain points in the B2B ecommerce shopping process:

With artificial intelligence software monitoring browsing behaviors and patterns, you’ll be able to tell whether consumers with buying power are converting.

If you discover that only a low percentage of actual buyers are spending money, you could conclude certain changes need to be made on your website.

Clearly, the right people are finding your business and navigating to your site. Those are the people you want to target moving forward.

Increase ROI

I’m sure you’re all familiar with this old business expression:

“You’ve got to spend money to make money.”

Artificial intelligence software isn’t free. So yes, you’ll need to dig into your pockets if you want to leverage these strategies.

The price will vary based on factors such as the application, scope, and complexity. But some types of machine learning can cost upward of $100k to $300k.

You’ll be able to find solutions for less, but the bottom line is you’ll likely be paying a premium for this type of technology integration.

It should come as no surprise that 48% of business owners aren’t interested in marketing solutions driven by AI because of the high costs. This is the number one reason why marketers are hesitant to adapt.

But you need to look at the big picture here. Spending money now can help you save much more in the long run.

Think about your current budget and expenses for these different categories and strategies.

How much are you spending on each one yearly?

If AI can help you reduce those costs by a significant percentage, the software will potentially pay for itself within just a few years or maybe even less.

After that, you’ll see a much higher ROI on these campaigns because the software you’re using will make it more efficient. I already gave some examples of this when I talked about targeting customers based on predictive analysis.

With the help of AI, IBM was able to reduce its average cost per click by 31%. In some instances, the cost reduction was as high as 71%.

Don’t be discouraged by the initial costs of AI implementation. Your B2B company will end up benefiting from a higher ROI in the long run.

Improve lead generation

Where are your leads coming from?

As I previously discussed, generating new leads isn’t always easy for B2B companies.

Some of your current lead generation strategies may not be working as well as you would like them to. You’re not alone.

Artificial intelligence will streamline this process and make it much easier for you to appeal to current and prospective customers. Here’s what I mean.

Let’s use your email marketing strategy as an example.

Right now, you’re probably segmenting your clients based on different factors such as location, industry, and size of the company. This is a great start and will definitely give you better results than non-personalized campaigns.

But you can take this process one step further with AI.

By monitoring the browsing behavior of the clients on your email list, you can send them enhanced personalized content that fits their needs.

Just segmenting your clients into lists based on factors such as geographic location won’t tell you who is browsing for products and services valued at $50,000 compared to $5,000. AI solutions can help you tell these customers apart so they can be targeted accordingly.

Artificial intelligence can personalize the web browsing as well as mobile app usage experience of your customers.

Generate high profits from top accounts

As I just finished explaining, you can use AI to help you identify the difference between customers based on how much they spend.

Every customer is important, but, obviously, you can’t treat a customer who spends $200k annually the same as a customer who spends $3,000.

In fact, 60% of B2B marketers say gaining better insights from client accounts is the top benefit of using AI for marketing.

To get higher profits from your top spending customers, AI can help you improve your account-based marketing funnel:

As you can see from this image, that funnel differs from a traditional lead generation funnel.

I already explained how AI can help you identify those high-value accounts. But this technology can assist you with the other stages of the funnel as well.

You’ll use personalization tactics, previously covered, to nurture and engage with those clients.

By enhancing the buyer’s journey with AI, you will make it easier for yourself to get those customers to continue converting and spending more money. As a result, you’ll establish long-term relationships with those top accounts.

Conclusion

It’s no secret marketers are leveraging artificial intelligence to improve their businesses. This statement holds true for B2B companies as well.

As a B2B marketer, you need to recognize this and adapt accordingly.

AI can help you identify prospective customers and distinguish between buyers and website visitors.

It will improve your lead generation strategy and increase the ROI of your marketing campaigns.

Artificial intelligence will improve the buyer’s journey throughout each stage of the customer lifecycle. Ultimately, this will give your B2B clients a more personalized shopping experience.

Eventually, you can leverage AI to increase the profits from your top customers.

If you are not using AI, it’s not too late to jump on board. Even if you’re already using this technology to some extent, you can use this guide to help you take your strategies to the next level.

What expectations does your B2B company have for artificial intelligence in the coming year?

Our top picks for small business web hosting

InMotion is an all-around provider with a solid reputation: the Subaru of web hosts. It has a lot of plans to choose from across the traditional range of hosting options — shared, managed WordPress, VPS, and dedicated servers — and it prioritizes fast loading times with SSD storage, PHP 7, custom server caching, and two US-based servers. We also appreciate its rigorous security protocol: servers have custom firewalls and DDoS protection, it includes malware protection, and SSL certificates are free on all plans.

Where InMotion especially stands out is in its customer support, which caters to all levels of users. Its knowledge center is recognized as one of the best in the business, with thousands of help articles, FAQs, forums, training videos, and guides to help even the most entry-level administrator feel in control. You’ll see InMotion support staff respond to specific questions in each article’s comments section, and there’s even a community support subsection, where one-off questions are answered by InMotion super users. The US-based customer service team is available 24/7 across live chat and email and phone, and InMotion offers a whopping 90-day money-back guarantee — one of the longest available.

InMotion staff answers user questions in the comments of their support center’s articles.

We think most small businesses will be happy on one of InMotion’s Business shared hosting plans, which include a free domain; unlimited storage, bandwidth, and email; and one-click installation of more than 400 apps. When you’re ready to upgrade, InMotion has a straightforward approach. As you move up the food chain, you won’t get upsold on additional features or slicker tools. You’ll just get more power — 2X the performance with each upgrade. What other hosts consider add-ons, InMotion offers even on its lowest-tier plans, including automatic backups and one free restore every four months, plus three free website/database migrations. The only extra perk the highest-tier shared hosting plan offers is an uptime guarantee: for every month InMotion’s server performance dips below an average 99.999% uptime, you’re eligible for a free month of hosting.

With promotional pricing, InMotion’s shared hosting plans can start as low as $4–5/month and managed WordPress hosting starts at $5–6/month. After that, pricing bumps up to around $8–9/month.

If InMotion is Subaru, SiteGround is Tesla: cutting-edge, powerful, and enormously well-respected. Its accolades are impossible to ignore: it’s one of WordPress’s three recommended web hosts and is the go-to for Redditusers, plus it has twice as many five-star reviews than any other provider on WhoIsHostingThis.

SiteGround is widely considered to a technology leader, especially when it comes to shared hosting — it’s often among the first hosts to provide access to developing tech to its customers. At this point, SSD drives, custom caching, CDN technology, NGINX, and PHP 7 are included to maximize speed on all levels of plans. SiteGround’s commitment to security is also no joke, with CHROOT account isolation, custom AI to counter brute-force attacks, and an in-house DevOps team to code proactive patches.

InMotion’s customer support is tough to beat, but SiteGround gives it a real run for its money. Customer support is available 24/7 across all channels — phone, chat, and email — and its knowledge base is rich and well-organized. SiteGround is probably the most transparent web host around regarding uptime: it has a 99.9% annual uptime guarantee (or you get a month of hosting free) and posts both its annual average and the previous month’s uptime right on its site.

SiteGround’s annual uptime compared to last month’s.

As one of WordPress’s recommended web hosts, it might come as no surprise that managed WordPress is built straight into all of SiteGround’s shared hosting plans — it’s not considered an upgrade, like it is with InMotion. If you’re a WordPress user, this is undeniably a perk: core updates are automatic, all plans are WP-CLI enabled for easier management, and security is tailored to counter WordPress-specific vulnerabilities. This isn’t to say that you can’t get those things on a standard shared hosting plan with InMotion — they’re just going to take more manual labor.

With SiteGround, upgrading your shared hosting plan gets you access to more: more power, yes, but also more tools and functionality. SiteGround is particularly well-known for its highest-tier shared hosting plan, GoGeek. On GoGeek, premium site caching will increase your site’s speed, you can make site-wide backups on demand (plus free restores), and you have access to pre-installed Git and WordPress staging. Pretty cool stuff, although potentially more than your small business needs.

SiteGround is designed to meet the needs of customers who are straddling the line of small business. It leaps from shared hosting straight to an $80/month cloud hosting solution or a $279/month dedicated server, skipping over the more traditional VPS stepping stone. And while SiteGround’s promo pricing is extremely reasonable, starting at $4/month, it triples at the end of your first contract. Yowch.

3 other web hosts for small businesses to consider

Another WordPress recommended web host, DreamHost also integrates managed WordPress hosting into is core shared hosting packages (as well as its super-speedy, cloud-based WordPress hosting plan called DreamPress). DreamHost stands out for having a completely customized back end instead of the universal cPanel most other Linux-based hosts use. Think of it like Apple versus Android: DreamHost customers love it, but it’s not a compatible solution should you ever switch hosts.

Dreamhost is a sleek web host with a traditional upgrade path: shared hosting to managed WordPress hosting to VPS to cloud hosting or a dedicated server. Customer service is a little less traditional: email support is available 24/7, but live chat is only on during business hours, and you actually have to pay about $10 to get technical support over the phone. That said, the free trial period is the longest in the business — 97 days. Shared hosting plans start at $3/month, and since Dreamhost doesn’t do promo pricing, it won’t jump after your first contract is up.

The third and final WordPress-recommended host, Bluehost is a hugely popular option that builds in managed WordPress hosting to all its shared hosting plans. Its knowledge base is kind of a disaster — we recommend going straight to the search bar; browsing is pretty much pointless — and even though customer support is available 24/7 across phone, live chat, and email, it’s been under fire in recent years. Poor customer support is one of the biggest reasons Bluehost has only one star on Trustpilot, and less than half of customers rate it five-stars on WhoIsHostingThis.

Bluehost’s knowledge base is frustrating to browse or get answers fast.

Shared hosting with Bluehost starts at $4/month for your initial contract. Bluehost is a standout for offering five(!)-year contracts, which could lock you into some really low prices.

Another big name in small business web hosting, and it’s a bit of a mixed bag. We were surprised at how thorough Hostgator’s self-serve knowledge base is (despite a certain mid-90s design aesthetic) but disappointed it doesn’t offer any sort of email support — just phone and live chat. Hostgator tends to rank highly on tech publications like PCMag, but customer reviews are pretty dreadful: it has only one star on Trustpilot. If you’re interested in trying HostGator, we recommend taking full advantage of the 45-day money-back guarantee.

HostGator’s support center is surprisingly robust and useful, despite its outdated appearance.

HostGator does offer Windows hosting in addition to Linux, as well as a variety of options to upgrade, including cloud hosting, VPS hosting, managed WordPress, and a dedicated server. Shared hosting plans start at $3/month.

A web host to avoid

You can do better. Even though it offers Windows operating system and a wide range of plans across shared, managed WordPress, VPS, cloud, and dedicated servers, too many features (SSL certificates, SSD storage, site backups and restores) are only included in higher-tier plans or as add-ons. If that isn’t enough, its customer support is lacking, with no email and limited hours on live chat, plus a poorly organized knowledge base. The user reviews are also telling: two stars on Trustpilot and only 27% of users rate it 5 stars on WhoIsHostingThis.

How to find the best web hosting for small businesses

Customer support

Small business owners don’t always get the luxury of an IT department (or even a web administrator) on staff. Often, your web host’s customer support — and the self-service help articles, tutorials, and blogs it provides — act as the stand-in. That’s why we make technical support one of the highest priorities for small businesses. It’s like health insurance: it doesn’t matter how robust a plan is if you can’t settle a claim.

Money-back guarantee

Most web hosts offer some sort of free trial period. We recommend using this time to really dig into your host’s customer support — its knowledge center and especially support staff across all channels. DreamHost and InMotion both offer industry-leading money-back periods at 97 and 90 days respectively. Most other hosts give you around one month.

24/7 support

Every web host claims it, but each delivers 24/7 support in its own way. InMotion, SiteGround, and Bluehost all offer 24/7 phone, live chat, and email support. By comparison, GoDaddy offers 24/7 phone, but limits live chat to business hours and has no email support at all.

Reputation

There can be a discrepancy between reputation and rankings, and while neither can reliably predict your future experience with a web host, they provide insight on where to pay close attention during your trial period. Take, for example, HostGator. Technology publications tend to rank its products highly: it earns a score of 4.5 out of 5 on both CNET and PCMag. But it has 1 star on Trustpilot and only 37 percent of nearly 600 users give it 5 stars on WhoIsHostingThis — and nearly all of negative comments are directed at customer service.

Knowledge center

A quality knowledge center is expansive, informative, and intuitively organized. InMotion’s best-in-class support center includes everything from entry-level courses on the basics (cPanel, WordPress, email) to advanced product guides, a thriving user community, and InMotion moderators answering questions in each article’s comments section. Bluehost’s help center is comparatively a black hole of clicking around and searching to see if you stumble across an article with the information you need.

Web host specs

Every web host is likely to offer way more than what your website needs to run well. The key is making sure that it has the right stuff (it doesn’t really matter that DreamHost doesn’t support Drupal unless you use Drupal on your site). Most web hosts offer several tiers of plans across each type of hosting — shared, VPS, etc. As you ratchet up the tiers, your host can accommodate bigger, more complex websites. Higher tiers usually unlock access to premium features and tools, and often come with more add-on services included for free.

Storage

The size of your website — how many gigabytes of content and programs it contains — determines how much room on a server your site takes up. Some web hosts put a cap on website storage, especially on lower-tier plans: SiteGround’s lowest tier maxes out user storage at 10GB; Bluehost’s cap is 100GB. Other plans advertise “unlimited” or “unmetered” storage and bandwidth — there’s no hard cap on what your site is allowed to use.

A note on unlimited: As Hostgator puts it, unlimited doesn’t mean infinite. Every web host will throttle your site or suspend your account if you’re using so much storage or bandwidth that it is negatively impacting the performance of other sites on your shared server. This is designed to protect your fellow shared customers from sluggish performance that’s out of their control (we don’t get to pick our neighbors) but it’s a seemingly alarming clause that’s built into every host’s terms of service. Don’t worry about it too much. Most websites will never experience throttling or service suspension. Bluehost claims that 99.95 percent of its 2 million websites stay within “normal” usage.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is how much of the server’s information pipeline your website is using to send and receive data to your visitors. Most web hosts provide unmetered bandwidth, but like with storage, you can’t hog so much that the other users on your shared server are getting poor site performance. Traffic is the easiest way to predict bandwidth, which is why some hosts offer approximate visitor thresholds. SiteGround’s shared hosting plans are designed to accommodate 10,000–100,000 monthly visitors, depending on the plan, while all of HostGator’s shared plans can support between 7,000–8,000 visitors per day (or about 200,000–250,000 visitors per month).

Number of websites

If you’re launching more than one website on the same web hosting plan, it’s important to remember that storage and bandwidth are measured all together — not per site. For example, SiteGround’s middle-tier plan, GrowBig, can host an unlimited number websites, but offers 20GB of storage and can accommodate around 25,000 monthly visitors total. If you have 10 sites hosted on a GrowBig plan, and the videos you post on site number two always go viral, that site may use up the bandwidth allotted for your other nine sites too.

Supported technology

Make sure the programs, features, and apps you’re using (or plan to use) are compatible with your host. The vast majority of websites are built on WordPress, and virtually every web host will work seamlessly. But what if your site uses Magento? Is any of your site coded in Perl or Python? Double check that your host is compatible with what you want to use, and dig into the knowledge base and customer support around those things, too. If a host advertises its compatible with Joomla, it’s not much use if there is no documentation or experienced staff to help you out when you hit a snag.

The other thing to double check is which operating system your site uses. Linux is the most common, but if your site runs on Windows OS, it will be a no-go. InMotion, SiteGround, DreamHost, and Bluehost are Linux-only. HostGator and GoDaddy have both Linux and Windows servers.

Room to grow

The cheapest web hosting is shared hosting. That’s where lots of small businesses start out before upgrading to VPS hosting, cloud hosting, or a dedicated server. Some hosts include a managed WordPress hosting option as well, which may be considered an upgrade and hosted on VPS or cloud servers. Others, including SiteGround and InMotion, keep their managed WordPress plans on shared servers.

You’ll know you’re ready to upgrade when your website is utilizing too much storage or bandwidth on your current plan — your host usually gives you a couple of days heads-up via email when this happens. More robust plans can accommodate bigger, more heavily trafficked sites. They also include access to more technical features.

Other web hosting features small businesses should know and look for

Backups: It’s best practice to manually backup your sites and databases on separate machines in case you delete something important, corrupt a file, or lose everything. Web hosts also often perform complementary auto-backups for those worst-case scenarios, and can help you restore your website to what it should be (sometimes for a fee).

Migrations: If you’re moving an existing website to a new web host, your new provider may include migration assistance to ensure it’s done correctly. This is especially convenient if you have a particularly complex website.

Uptime: This is a measure of what percentage of time a hosts servers are online. You want as close to 100% as possible, and most web hosts boast 99.9% uptime or higher. Many offer some sort of uptime guarantee: if they drop below 99.9% uptime, you can request a discount on your hosting fees. (And as a side note: If you’re launching a new website, make sure your business has a continuity plan in case there is system downtime.)

Email hosting: Most web hosts provide email hosting as well. This will get your a custom email address (as opposed to @gmail.com) and email storage, and often it’s included in the price of admission.

SSD storage: SSD stands for Solid State Drive. This technology is many times faster than what’s used on normal hard drives. If you’re server uses SSD storage, your website’s content will be delivered to your visitors faster.

SSH access: Secure Shell access means you have a secure connect straight into your account to manage files and databases — a must-have feature for the technically inclined.

SSL certificates: A certificate for Secure Sockets Layer encryption is a signal that your website is secure and safe to submit sensitive data, including passwords and credit card info. It’s important for all websites to be SSL certified — Google considers it a trust factor — and mandatory if there are any transactions happening on your site.

Domain registration and privacy: If you’re creating a new website, you’ll need to purchase and register a domain. Many hosts allow you to purchase and register a domain at the same time as you purchase your plan, although it’s not necessary (you can host a domain that’s been purchased anywhere on any host). We recommend always opting in for domain privacy, which is typically a $12–20/year upsell, although some hosts throw it in for free. Domain privacy will keep your personal contact information off of the WHOIS registry.

]]>http://www.quicksprout.com/best-web-hosting-for-small-business/How to Grow Your YouTube Channel with These 12 Toolshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/0KxgKO0_Lu8/
http://www.quicksprout.com/2018/11/02/how-to-grow-your-youtube-channel-with-these-12-tools/#commentsFri, 02 Nov 2018 15:00:37 +0000https://www.quicksprout.com/?p=41445[click to continue...]]]>When people talk about social media, the first networks that come to mind are usually Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

While YouTube may not be your first thought, it needs to become a priority for you moving forward.

But your YouTube channel is only as good as the number of subscribers, traffic, and views you get on your videos. You could be producing the best video content in the world, but it’s useless if nobody watches it.

I love YouTube because it’s a great way to repurpose content.

After I upload content to my YouTube channel, I share it on my website, blog posts, and social media platforms.

If you’re struggling to grow your YouTube channel, it’s probably because you’re not using anything to help you create better content. While the YouTube platform in itself is useful, there are other tools you can use that will enhance your content and make it easier for you to manage your page.

That was my inspiration for this post. I’ll show you the top 12 tools you need to grow your YouTube channel. Let’s dive in.

1. TubeBuddy

I like this tool because it’s a free browser extension as opposed to software you need to download and launch separately each time you want to take advantage of its features.

TubeBuddy automatically integrates with YouTube and assists you with managing your channel.

It allows you to run tests that will improve the performance of your content.

You can test:

tags

titles

thumbnails

descriptions

The tool helps you figure out which ones work the best for the exposure and growth of your channel.

Another top benefit of TubeBuddy is the scheduling feature. You can determine when you want uploaded videos to get published in the future.

The scheduling tool works both ways. You can also set a specific time and date for a video to be removed from certain playlists on the channel without having to do it manually.

TubeBuddy tracks your rankings and compares your analytics to those of your competition on YouTube as well as in Google searches.

This extension lets you update videos in bulk. It’s a great option if you have hundreds of videos and want to update all the descriptions simultaneously.

If you’re planning to promote one of your videos in the description of all your other videos, consider this tool.

You can also improve your thumbnail creation process with TubeBuddy.

Plus, it has options for all different types of YouTube users:

creators

brands

agencies

networks

No matter which category you fall in, TubeBuddy will have you covered.

This extension makes it easier for you to reach your YouTube subscribers on other social media channels. It’s truly an all-in-one tool.

2. Social Blade

Social Blade is another top option for you to consider. I like it because it tracks different statistics on YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, and Twitter.

6. Pixlr

The right thumbnail can help you get more clicks and views on your content. Pixlr makes it easy for you to create high performing thumbnails.

This tool is also great for including images into any video content.

Pixlr allows you to add layers and effects to any image.

This software offers tons of photo editing options. It can help you with any of your visual content needs outside of YouTube as well.

Plus, they have a web app and mobile app. It’s easy to edit and upload content no matter what device you’re using.

7. Tubular Insights

Formally known as ReelSEO, Tubular Insights keeps you up to date with the latest trends, tips, and analysis for your video marketing strategy.

Experts offer advice and guides on this network to help marketers producing video content.

Tubular Insights tracks all video content from all devices and platforms from across the globe. Then, it breaks down these videos by trends.

Use this information to create timely and relevant to your audience videos.

Here, you’ll find great blog posts about all topics related to YouTube. There are even extremely easy to follow how-to guides.

You can search for top YouTube creators and learn from their success stories.

8. Keyword Tool

As the name implies, Keyword Tool gives you suggestions for YouTube keywords.

You can use these keywords in your titles, tags, and descriptions.

The great part about Keyword Tool is it offers long-tail keyword suggestions as well.

Just as you optimize your site for search engines, you need to optimize your YouTube channel for search.

In addition to YouTube, Keyword Tool can help you generate relevant keywords for Google, Amazon, Bing, and other search engines. You’ll benefit from a higher ranking and more traffic to all your channels.

Select the country you’re targeting to improve your reach.

As I said before, creating a great video isn’t enough. You need people to see your content, or it won’t be effective.

You want to make sure your videos can be found through organic searches. That’s why you should use Keyword Tool.

9. Camtasia

Lots of times, you’ll be explaining how to do something on your computer.

But you don’t want to record your screen with a camera or smartphone. It’s not efficient and looks unprofessional. You’ll likely have a glare on the screen as well.

Plus, if you’re just explaining how to do something without showing people, it will be extremely difficult for them to follow your instructions.

Camtasia is my favorite tool for screen recordings.

After you record your screen, you can mark up the videos, make edits, and add effects. It’s ideal for anyone creating video tutorials because you can record the movement of your mouse and show keystrokes as well.

Add notes and other annotations such as highlights, arrows, and captions for people watching your videos without sound.

A voice narration feature allows you to record yourself speaking during or after you record the screen. Camtasia has other audio effects and even has an option to add music.

It’s great for showcasing presentations and slideshows via YouTube.

This tool also has a green screen function, animations, and interactivity features such as quizzes. Overall, it’s something you should have in your arsenal of your YouTube tools.

10. vidIQ

I like vidIQ because it’s another way to monitor and track your YouTube audience analytics.

Find out exactly who is watching your content. Then, you can create videos that appeal to that audience. Market to their needs accordingly.

With vidIQ, you can get detailed reports to improve your YouTube channel.

The platform also offers SEO tools.

In addition, you can identify influencers, manage comments, and run a competitive comparison against other channels.

Use the vidIQ free Google Chrome extension. The extension allows you to see the top keywords and tags used by other channels.

Monitor keyword scores, views, and other search term metrics all from one place.

You can also track your engagement metrics on both YouTube and Facebook with the vidIQ tool.

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So, you’re ready to build an online store and sell, ship, and manage your business. We’re here to help. We took a look at six of the biggest names in e-commerce software to find out which store is easiest to set up, customizable to your liking, and economical. There’s no stress needed here: all of our options offer at least 14-day free trial periods for you to set up your store and see if you like it and it has all the features you need.

What’s the Right E-Commerce Software for You?

There are two worlds in e-commerce software: hosted and self-hosted. With hosted platforms, like Shopify and BigCommerce, you’ll get ready-to-go drag-and-drop templates, but you’ll give up some customization ability and pay a subscription fee. For most merchants, Shopify and BigCommerce are going to be in a dead heat. Both companies offer products that provide the same thing: an all-in-one hosted e-commerce solution for online businesses. They both do it well and they both start with similar price points.

If you’re trying to decide between Shopify and BigCommerce, we recommend comparing both during their free trial periods and see which one is a better fit for your business. Both offer a couple of weeks to set up and explore your store, no credit card required.

It’s also possible to build a store with Squarespace or Wix site, monetize your existing site, or even build a non-store site and then convert it to a credit-card accepting store later on. This is a good option if you’re already using Squarespace or Wix, if not sure how much of your sales you’ll run through your site, or are just in the ideation phase. Wix will let you build your whole site for free; you’ll only need an e-commerce subscription when you’re ready to take that first credit card transaction. You can get up to 21 days free with Squarespace if you ask to extend the two-week free trial an extra week.

Want more customization power, or not ready to pony up a monthly fee? You want self-hosted software like Magento or WooCommerce — you’ll be nearly limitless in what you can do, and there are plenty of pre-made plugins you can pay for and install to avoid coding every little thing (think abandoned cart e-mails or related products carousels). If you go this route, we recommend brushing up on the best practices for running a successful e-commerce site, making a list of all the features you want and tallying up the add-on fees you’ll be paying before you commit to building your store.

Shopify is one of the most recognizable out-of-the-box solutions for small business owners — by some measures, it’s the second most popular e-commerce platform in the world after WooCommerce, and continues to grow like crazy. We think it’s a good fit fore-commerce sites that don’t have a lot of in-house technical support and don’t crave a ton of complex customizations.

Shopify is a full-blown hosted e-commerce platform, which means that it takes care of everything you need to run an online business, from a website to website hosting to inventory management to accepting credit card information. It also offers point-of-sale hardware, and integrates into online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay.

Shopify’s core product comes in a few different plans for different prices, ranging from $29/month to $299/month. More robust functionality (and more perks, like better credit card rates, more user accounts, and advanced reporting) come with the higher price tag. If you already have a website and are interested in adding some shoppable products and a shopping cart, we recommend skipping down to where we discuss Shopify Lite. Full-blown Shopify is probably more than you need.

Shopify makes it pretty straightforward for a small business to get up and running — like a lot of hosted e-commerce platforms (including BigCommerce), you have a 14-day free trial where you can actually build your entire store and try out the features and functionality without ever entering a credit card number. Shopify is template-based, which means you choose the basic look and layout of your store from 10 free or 57 for-purchase themes, and customize from there. Shopify claims that its templates are fully customizable, and it does give its merchants full access to the HTML and CSS of their stores, but heads-up: Shopify uses a Liquid setup, which will have a little bit of a learning curve for those who are more used to PHP.

Because it’s such a force in the industry, Shopify integrates with pretty much every other app, SaaS, and technology out there, be it live order tracking, automated up-selling bots, or finding dropship products to sell. Shopify has its own app store a la Apple and Google with built-for-Shopify (and often built-by-Shopify) technology that you can plug and play to make your store do everything you want. This is a double-edged sword for some merchants, who find that Shopify relies so much on third-party integrations that some of its built-in technology is lacking. A good rule of thumb: Make a list of all the functionality you want for your site and see if you’re satisfied with what you get for free during your 14-day trial. If not, explore what add-ons and plugins are available (there are over 2,400 in the Shopify app store) and see how much they’ll add to your bottom line.

Speaking of bottom lines: You’re going to have to do a lot of math to see which payment gateway makes the most sense for your business no matter which e-commerce platform you choose. But one of Shopify’s biggest standouts is that it’s built its own payment gateway, Shopify Payments. While you still can integrate with over 100 others (in fact, you’ll have to if you have customers outside of the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, and Singapore), Shopify Payments potentially eliminates one more integration you’d have to do to get up and running. At 2.9% + $0.30, Shopify Payments’ rates are right in line with other leading payment gateways, including PayPal, stripe, and Authorize.net, but it does tack on an extra 2% transaction fee for any payment that isn’t processed through Shopify Payments. Check to make sure you qualify to sign up for Shopify Payments in its Terms of Service, then get out your calculators. Remember, accepting multiple payment options is one of the 11 best ways to boost online sales.

Outside of its core e-commerce hosting, Shopify offers a supercharged and highly customizable ShopifyPlus plan for high-volume merchants and enterprise businesses, and Shopify Lite, which is essentially just Shopify’s payment processing functionality. The Lite plan might be interesting to very small businesses just entering e-commerce. It acts a lot like PayPal: you can pop a Shopify Buy Button into your WordPress or Squarespace site, swipe credit cards with its app, and sell on Facebook and Facebook Messenger. Shopify Lite is $9/month.

Like Shopify, BigCommerce’s core product is available at a few different functionality tiers, ranging from $30/month to $250/month; also like Shopify, higher tiers are more robust, including features like abandoned cart saver, product filtering, and customer loyalty programs. Unlike Shopify, though, BigCommerce has a sales cap on each of its plans. If you’re bringing in more than $50k/year, for example, you’ll no longer qualify for the Standard plan, and be automatically upgraded to Plus ($80/month with a sales cap of $150k per year).

Once you’re inside the product, you’ll see both are built to act similarly. BigCommerce is also theme-based, with 7 free mobile-friendly templates (plus 119 for purchase) for you to install and customize, be it through a drag-and-drop site editor or from the ground-up using the theme’s framework. Shopify and BigCommerce are so comparable we recommend comparing both during their free trial periods and see which one is a better fit for your business. BigCommerce offers 15 days to set up and explore your store, no credit card required.

One difference you’ll definitely notice is how many native features BigCommerce has installed right out of the box. It offers an outstanding number of technical integrations and marketing features that Shopify might only be able to provide if you buy and install a plugin or extension (for example, single-page checkout). For some, BigCommerce’s roster of pre-installed features is going to be annoying — kind of like how annoying it was for people who didn’t like U2 having its most recent album auto-downloaded on their iPhones. BigCommerce customers might roll their eyes as they scroll by an option to add gift wrapping already built into their control panel. But those who aren’t overwhelmed by the options may find that they don’t need to pay extra for the functionality they do want. We recommend making a list of the features your business needs requires and testing if you like how they perform during your free trial, and check out what’s available in BigCommerce’s app store. That store isn’t as massive as Shopify’s (600+ add-ons and integrations compared to 2,500+) but there’s a lot to choose from. You also have access to BigCommerce’s flexible API if you need to make a custom integration

BigCommerce doesn’t have its own payment processing technology, which means you’ll have to integrate with a payment gateway before you start taking orders. It gives you over 60 to choose from, including all the big hitters: Authorize.net, PayPal, Stripe, Square, Skrill. Like Shopify, the higher tier your plan, the lower your rates. Unlike Shopify, BigCommerce doesn’t charge a transaction fee to work with these processors, so you’ll save a little there.

In addition to its core e-comm platforms, BigCommerce is also available at the enterprise level and with products tailored to B2B wholesalers. In summer 2018, BigCommerce also announced its new Commerce-as-a-Service solution, which is geared to service content-first small businesses who already have an established web presence — namely, a WordPress website. Through an integrated plugin, WordPress users (and businesses using other content management software) will be able to work in their CMS while “centrally managing catalog, customer and order data through BigCommerce.” Prior, customers would have to port their entire websites over and rebuild it on BigCommerce’s hosted platform, or opt for a self-hosted solution like WooCommerce or Magento. Commerce-as-a-Service is really new to BigCommerce — there’s no pricing and interested customers need to request a demo — but we’re excited to see where this technology goes. It could be an exciting bridge between the robust functionality of a hosted e-commerce platform and the hands-on DIY integrations of self-hosted solutions.

You might know Wix as a drag-and-drop website builder, but it’s also a drag-and-drop e-commerce shop builder, too. And the process is just as simple: create an account, choose your template (there are 60 e-commerce templates to choose from), load your inventory and product pages, set up payment information, and start selling. You can even get started picking your template, designing your store, and trying out the store manager where you’ll track orders, manage inventory, and send out customer newsletters with coupon codes or sales — all for free. Signing up is a simple a logging in with your Google or Facebook account.

It’s not until you want to accept payments that you’ll need to upgrade your account to a business / e-commerce account. Wix Business plans range from $20 to $35 per month — but they’re billed in full yearly subscriptions at the time of purchase, so really you’ll be laying out $240 to $420. You’ll get 14-days to test drive the plan.

All business plans allow you to accept online payments without paying commissions, and get unlimited bandwidth (so any number of customers can visit your store). The more expensive plans grant you more storage, up to 100,000 emails a month and higher-priority support response. You’ll also get 30G of Google Drive and email storage, so once you connect your domain you can use Gmail as your email at your unique address.

With a business plan, you can take credit cards, PayPal, offline payments, and don’t have to pay any commissions to Wix. Not all businesses are the same, so neither are the Wix templates. Any Wix template can run a store, if you add the “Wix Stores” app, or you can get a head-start with a pre-made stores template. To do that, you’ll first choose your business-type.

Run a bookings-based business? You’ll start with a Wix Bookings template. Your customers will get auto-email reminders about the event. Sell sessions individually or as part of a membership plan. If you accept offline payments, it’s as simple as checking the “mark as fully paid” box on the bookings dashboard. There’s even a bookings template for restaurants.

We like that it’s super fluid to make sales and note when you’re busy: simply block off time you’re not available in your Wix schedule on the mobile app; sync your Wix Bookings with you Google calendar automatically. Customers can also book directly from their mobile phones, too — by creating a club and inviting your customers to it, they can chat you, book a service, RSVP to an event, or start a discussion from the app.

We haven’t seen anything like the Wix Music page includes a customizable music player and a way to sell your music directly from your page, without paying any commissions. Your reporting will include most-played, most-shared, most-purchased, and most-downloaded songs.

There’s also a pre-made template for ticketed events businesses. You can set the ticket price, manage the RSVP list, invite and add guests, and edit details.

From there, it’s all the drag-and-drop joy Wix is known for. You’ll want to design a “storefront” or homepage, product pages for each of the items you sell with images and product information. Want the menu in a different place, in a different font, with other elements? Drag it, change it, save it. If you’ve ever felt templates to be limiting — I can change that but only in those 3 predetermined ways?! — then you’ll love the new Wix Code. It’s a hybrid platform, with all of the ease of a drag-and-drop and the control of your own customization and scripting with a built-in database, JavaScript backend and integrated development environment. Simply turn on the Wix Code editor and you’re in. (We should note: it’s in beta.)

We like the clean lines and look of the Wix templates, the drag-and-drop ease of it all, and the head start the pre-made stores give you. Unlike self-hosted e-commerce plans, which require upgrades to access features like coupon codes, everything’s included with a Wix e-commerce plan.

Squarespace is best known as a website builder, but its e-commerce solution is one of the most popular in the world. In large part that’s because e-commerce functionality is built straight into nearly all of its plans: Even if you start with just a basic website, you can sell products. That grow-into-it flexibility makes it an interesting option for businesses who aren’t quite sure of their future plans. With a platform like Shopify, you’re e-commerce or nothing. A business without a thriving online store would be never choose Shopify.

But that makes choosing the right Squarespace plan a little bit more complicated. It splits up its products into Websites (with Personal and Business plans) and Online Stores (with Basic and Advanced plans). You can make transactions on both the Online Store plans, as well as the Business Website plan. A good rule of thumb: if you’re primarily selling product through your site, definitely opt for an Online Store plan. If your website is primarily content, and you happen to sell a few things, a Business Website plan might be plenty. All plans come with a 14-day free trial to test out the features and functionality, with the option to request an additional trial week if necessary.

The Business Website plan has pared-down functionality — the reporting isn’t as robust; there are no customer accounts; there are fewer inventory, order, and tax features — plus it tacks on a 3% transaction fee to all purchases. But it’s also only $18/month, which is one of the cheapest hosted options available.

Both of Squarespace’s Online Store plans comes with the full toolkit you’d expect from an e-commerce platform. Basic starts at $26/month, billed annually (or $30/month if you want to pay month-to-month), and Advanced ratchets up to $40/month billed annually (or $46/month-to-month). The Advanced plan gets you more — flexible discounts, gift cards, abandoned cart recover, access to the API.

If you do go with a Squarespace web store, it’s going to be beautiful. That’s not to say you can’t have a beautiful store with any other e-commerce platform, but with Squarespace, it’s basically a guarantee. They’re all built for mobile and aesthetically modern, albeit lots are heavy on imagery — you’re definitely going to want to have killer photography. It has over 20 template “families” to choose from (each family may have a few variations, but the same underlying structure), which can then be customized with Squarespace’s drag-and-drop editor or by tinkering with the HTML and CSS. You can choose any, but some are better suited for web stores than websites, with features such as Quick View and Image Zoom, and advanced Product Page functionality. The best news: they’re all free. With a lot of other e-commerce platforms, the really covetable templates come with a price tag.

With Squarespace, what you get is what you get. Unlike pretty much every other e-commerce platform, it doesn’t integrate with endless apps and extensions. It comes with about 70 of the most popular and most useful built right in, and provides setup support, troubleshooting, and general questions for all of them. But there’s no app store or marketplace like you see with lots of other platforms. You can install third-party customization, but those will required some sort of code injection or “Code Block” — no one-click install. It’s really important to test out the functionality of your Squarespace site during your free trial and see if you like what you’re getting. If not, another platform with more integration capabilities might be a better option.

Squarespace also doesn’t give you options with who you use to process payments. With Squarespace, you’re locked into Stripe and/or PayPal (there’s also options for Apple Pay and Venmo). This won’t be a problem if your store services customers in certain areas, but Stripe doesn’t support all countries — only 26. If that’s the case, PayPal will be your only option (which means your customers must have a PayPal account to make a purchase).

Magento is open-source self-hosted software — you can change anything in the code that you need to, and you’ll need a web host of your own. There are quite a few pricing options: the community edition is totally free to download. WE recommend starting here for most small business owners choosing Magento. Depending on the host you choose, you’ll pay between $4 and $100 a month for hosting. (Want help picking out a web host? See our web host review here.)

Unlike Shopify, you have full control over your shop — “how you deliver your customer experience” — without any limitations. That’s why for large-scale stores in need of the ability to create complex customizations without limit, Magento beats Shopify handedly. (In 2016, 202 Magento customers were in the Internet Retailer Top 1000 list, compared to 12 Shopify customers — and 42 merchants in the Internet Retailer B2B E-Commerce 300.) Magento held the top spot on that list. Impressive, but if you’re starting a small, simple shop, you’ll still likely be happier with Shopify or another hosted, out-of-the-box and less custom pick.

Magento claims its stores grow faster than Shopify stores — 3x on average. Magento cites the ability to build fully custom experiences as the reason for this difference. They say these stores stand out more. We’re not so sure: it might be a chicken-or-the-egg question: Magento is more customizable, so larger stores that know they’re going to be growing may sign up with Magento at a higher rate. With a higher percentage of these high-growth stores, all Magento stores have a higher growth rate. We do love that Magento loves high-performance and letting you do what you want to do.

With Magento, you have the option to build your own site from the ground up, or use Magento’s drag-and-drop visual editor. If you’ve used Mailchimp or Squarespace, you’ll find Magento’s super familiar and intuitive.

If you’re not a coder, or don’t have one on your team, the 5,000 extensions and add-ons are very important — using them you can still customize what you want to. Want to add an abandoned cart recovery to your site? There’s a pre-built one for $39. Custom coupon error codes? User logins with permission sets? There are pre-built ones waiting for you. Custom doesn’t need to be impossible even if you’re not a developer.

Frontend features

Coupon codes

Gift cards

Customer dashboards

Related products

Wishlists

Order status modules

Distraction-free checkout

One-click account creation

Two-step checkout

Automatic guest checkout

What’s in a name?

Magento recently changed some of its product names. Here’s a before/after:

Magento enterprise licenses

Magento Open Source is free. Magento Commerce — an “all-in-one cloud solution that delivers the power of Magento at affordable prices for Small Business” — is not. Prices are relative to your gross sales revenue. But it’ll cost you ~$20,000 for up to $1M in annual revenue. Sell more, pay more. Though Magento is really open that their prices are negotiable — so schedule a demo and get negotiating!

To get a sense of where Magento’s pricing stake points are here are quotes Portland-based creative agency Graybox got from Magento in 2017:

Gross Sales Revenue

Magento 2 Enterprise

Edition (EE)

Magento 2 Enterprise Cloud

Edition (ECE)

Up to $1 million

$22,000

$40,000

$5–10 million

$32,000

$55,000

$10–25 million

$49,000

$80,000

$25–50 million

$125,000

$190,000

There’s no limit on store count, country count, language, or currency on your license. You can manage multiple stores, transact in multiple countries, in multiple languages and currencies, and use worldwide shipping all on your one subscription (instance). Go big, go global, launch more stores!

WooCommerce brags that it has 53,216,823 downloads, and as such is the most popular eCommerce platform for building an online store (stats from Builtwith). It’s a lot like the 100 Billion hamburgers McDonald’s has served. It doesn’t mean it’s the best hamburger, but they sure do sell well, so there’s something good enough about it. They power 30% of online stores — the most of any e-commerce software. The catch? If you want to do more advanced or powerful things in your store, like run a recommendation engine or sell recurring subscriptions, you’ll need to pay for extensions. Some extensions are free, but many aren’t, they’re $29, $79, sometimes $199 for a one-site subscription. When its integrated so well into a platform you’re probably already using, well, it’s no wonder that 53 million people have used it.

WooCommerce runs on any self-hosted WordPress.org site. You’ll need a theme. That’s the beautiful outer layer of your website. (If you’re already running a WordPress site, then installing Woo is as simple as activating any other plugin. You know the drill.)

WooCommerce has a free template called Storefront, which prioritizes speed, uptime, and theme/plugin simplicity. It’s the “official” theme, and it’s purposefully clean and simple. It is built and maintained by WooCommerce core developers, and promises “water-tight” integration between the theme, WooCommerce, and any extensions or plugins you add. (WooCommerce.com is running on a $39 Storefront child theme, which gives the Storefront theme a new look.) There are also plenty of templates for sale that aren’t created by WooCommerce or WordPress.

You’ll be able to sell physical and digital goods, instant downloads, or affiliate goods in online marketplaces. It also accounts for product variations and configurations. Shipping, including drop-shipping, “is highly configurable.” Want to calculate shipping prices per customer? Want to limit shipments to specific countries? Offer free shipping? It’s all possible.

If you upgrade, using any of the 300+ premium extensions, you can add on bookings, repeating subscriptions, and memberships. There are hundreds of extensions in the WooCommerce official marketplace. Popular ones include Stripe, PayPal, USPS, Amazon Payments, Authorize.Net, ShipStation, and MailChimp. For example, want to add reviews to your Storefront site? There’s a $19 extension for that. Want a pricing comparison table to show the difference between your Bronze, Silver, and Gold Memberships? There’s a $19 extension and you’ll get access to a shortcode generator to copy and paste into your layout how you’d like.

At WooCommerce, the customer service team is manned by “Happiness Engineers.” These very same team behind WordPress.com, Simplenote, Jetpack, and Longreads. The motto? “We believe in making the web a better place.”

They work remotely from 69 countries, speak 84 languages, and strive to live by the Automattic Creed, which includes the line, “I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation.”

That customer loyalty and product-first mindset permeates the entire company. In fact, the first three weeks of any employees time are spend in customer service, and one week a year “forevermore” after that. Why? “We believe an early and ongoing connection with the people who use our products is irreplaceable.”

To get in touch with this support squad, the first stop is documentation. You’ll find extremely detailed step-by-step instructions, how tos, and ways to fix common issues like blurry images. Need more help than that? Woo also has a help desk where you can submit a ticket or start a live chat. There’s no phone, Facebook, or Twitter support.

Frontend features

Shipping calculator

Free shipping

Mobile responsive

Digital or physical goods

Instant downloads

One-page checkout (with $79 extension)

Social logins (with $79 extension)

Name-your-price (with $49 extension)

Recommendation engine (with $79 extension)

Courses and training videos

Recap: The Best E-Commerce Platforms

Make a list of all the features you want, decide how much hands-on customization you’re after, and give your first pick a spin. All of our top picks have at least 14 day trial periods for you to get your store up and test the software:

]]>http://www.quicksprout.com/best-ecommerce-platforms/How to Repurpose Your Content Across Multiple Marketing Platformshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/Xy-L8KfFYvg/
http://www.quicksprout.com/2018/10/31/how-to-repurpose-your-content-across-multiple-marketing-platforms/#commentsWed, 31 Oct 2018 15:00:35 +0000https://www.quicksprout.com/?p=41453[click to continue...]]]>Quality content takes time and effort to produce. I am sure you know this if you regularly publish content on all your distribution channels.

But many brands lose quality in pursuit of higher quantities of content.

While I agree that quantity is important as well, your quality can’t suffer as a result of this strategy. You need to learn how to avoid stale content.

I work with many businesses that run into this problem. They want to publish at least one piece of content a day on all their distribution channels.

Among their websites, blogs, and social media pages, it’s a lot of content. Before you know it, that’s upward of 30 posts per week across these platforms.

However, that doesn’t mean you need to come up with 30 unique pieces of content. This approach will take too long and ultimately hurt your quality.

That’s why you need to learn how to effectively repurpose your content across multiple marketing platforms.

Once you have an idea, you can turn it into multiple posts on each channel. In fact, sometimes you won’t even need to come up with a new idea. You can use old content to your advantage here as well.

Worker smarter, not harder.

As we continue through this guide, I’ll explain how you can repurpose your content across all your distribution channels and give you some ideas to try.

Identify your most popular content

Before you spend time producing new content, I recommend re-using older publications and posts.

After all, you already spent time working on these. Why let them go to waste?

But don’t just use any content. Start with your most popular pieces.

Identify your content with the highest engagement rates. Look for:

Facebook likes

retweets

posts with the most page views

email newsletters with the highest click-through rates

If you’re struggling to find what you need, try using Buzzsumo to see which content had the highest engagement on social media. Here’s what the content analyzer tool found when I put quicksprout.com into it:

It shows me which posts from the past year were the most popular. But you can filter the time based on your needs.

In addition to Buzzsumo, you can use Google Analytics to see which pages on your website are the most popular.

After you analyze your content with these tools, make a list of your top performing publications and posts.

This will be your starting point. You’ll use this list to repurpose content.

For example, if you had a high performing blog post, you can turn it into a YouTube video. You could use a Facebook post with the highest number of likes on your Instagram story.

The ideas are seemingly endless. As we continue, I’ll give you some more examples of how you can proceed.

Build custom infographics

Going through your old posts, you want to find ways to repurpose them for even more engagement.

Here’s what I mean.

If you take an email newsletter that had the highest number of opens, click-throughs, and conversions and turn it into a blog post, the idea is that the blog post will be high-performing as well.

Otherwise, what’s the point? You don’t want to publish content just for the sake of publishing.

When you write your evergreen content, you want to be as broad as possible. This post was fresh for an entire year. That wouldn’t be the case if it was the top trends to look for in January 2018. Do you see the difference?

Extremely specific content will only be relevant for a short period of time. Therefore, it’s more difficult for you to repurpose it.

Here’s another example. If you write a post about the Apple’s latest iOS update, it’s fresh only until a new version of the software is released. That’s not evergreen.

As you can see, it offers an incentive for people to submit their own content.

GoPro is giving away a million dollars, split between anyone who submits content that the company uses in a promotional video.

This saves the team a ton of time.

Instead of going out to different locations all over the world to shoot videos on their latest camera model, they put their customers to work instead.

Plus, they’ll be able to get way more footage this way as opposed to trying to do this on their own.

Once the videos are submitted, GoPro can repurpose them in a bunch of different ways. They can be used for advertisements, social media posts, YouTube videos, website content, and they can even be embedded in emails.

Come up with a similar strategy, and encourage your customers to submit pictures and videos.

I recommend using social media as a distribution platform for your UGC campaigns.

You can also find UGC without asking for it.

Sift through your comments.

Look at the comments on your social media pages and blog posts to see which ones can be repurposed.

If you notice similar comments or questions, use them to create an FAQ page.

Find your strongest introductions

Sometimes, all you need to do is repurpose a portion of your previously published content.

If you want to repurpose a short form of written content, I recommend using your post introductions.

Moving forward, create as much evergreen content as possible. This will make it easier for you to repurpose your content in the future.

Turn blog posts into podcasts. Use videos and other audio files to create posts.

Encourage user-generated content so you can repurpose it.

As you implement these strategies, you’ll realize you’re currently sitting on enough content to last you for months to come, as long as you can repurpose it effectively.

Use this guide as a reference to steer you in the right direction.

What type of content is your business repurposing on your distribution channels?

]]>http://www.quicksprout.com/2018/10/31/how-to-repurpose-your-content-across-multiple-marketing-platforms/feed/30http://www.quicksprout.com/2018/10/31/how-to-repurpose-your-content-across-multiple-marketing-platforms/How to Use the 2018 Holiday Season to Drive Saleshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/fnPsIuBeco8/
https://www.quicksprout.com/2018/10/29/how-to-use-the-2018-holiday-season-to-drive-sales/#commentsMon, 29 Oct 2018 15:00:28 +0000https://www.quicksprout.com/?p=41421[click to continue...]]]>With the holiday season quickly approaching, your business needs to take steps to prepare for a potential surge in sales.

But you can’t assume people will buy from your brand during the holidays if you sit back and do nothing. The brands able to recognize the latest marketing trends will have success in the coming months.

Consumers are willing and able to spend money during the holidays. It’s a fact.

How you prepare and position yourself will determine how much of the market share your company will control.

Even though the ecommerce industry is a competitive space, there is plenty of money to go around.

In fact, experts predict ecommerce sales to increase by 17-22% during the 2018 holiday season. November 1st to January 31st is considered the holiday season.

I know what some of you are thinking. There are holidays throughout the entire year. What makes the ones during those dates so special?

This should tell you that consumers are genuinely interested in tracking their orders. It gives them a chance to make sure everything is going according to schedule.

Studies show 93% of consumers refer to their emails for these notifications, and 38% of people want to be contacted on multiple channels.

If applicable, consider sending text messages and push notifications.

Here is another reason why tracking packages is such an important feature for you to offer.

Statistics indicate that 33% of people have had packages stolen from their doorsteps. Nearly 26 million Americans had packages stolen from their doorsteps or front porches during the 2017 holiday season.

With ecommerce sales expected to rise during the 2018 holiday season, it’s safe to assume theft will rise as well.

These are alarming numbers, but it’s reality. By alerting your customers their orders have been delivered, you can help reduce the chances of theft of their purchases.

Prioritize mobile commerce

By now, I hope you’ve recognized the importance of mobile optimization.

As you can see, people who wait until the last minute to buy gifts are significantly more likely to buy from retailers offering fast delivery.

Last-minute shoppers are 39% more likely to abandon their shopping carts if the delivery options are too slow.

Overall, 67% of consumers abandoned ecommerce shopping carts in the last year because of slow delivery times. This is a 16% increase from last year.

And 92% of consumers said that receiving their delivery on time was the most important factor they considered when purchasing a gift.

Unfortunately, it may not be reasonable to combine your fast delivery feature with your free shipping incentive.

If a last-minute shopper needs something shipped overnight two days before Christmas, they’ll have to pay a premium for shipping. But by this point, they’re willing to pay as long as it arrives on time.

Conclusion

The holiday season is a great opportunity for you to take advantage of consumer spending habits.

Since they spend more money, you have a chance to make more money. But this won’t come automatically.

Start promoting your holiday sales as early as possible. Run your best deals on the most popular shopping days of the year.

Make it appealing for customers to buy from you instead of your competition.

Quicksprout is reader-supported. That means we use affiliate links. When you click, we sometimes earn a commission. Learn more.

Editor’s note: We compared six of the best web hosting services to see how they stack up. We think most people will be very satisfied hosting their websites with SiteGround, InMotion Hosting, or DreamHost.

There are tons of web hosts out there though — literally hundreds of them. So while we think our top picks are excellent options, we’ll walk you through how to find the best web hosting service for your website, using our six hosts as examples.

Our 3 Favorite Web Hosting Providers

SiteGround is a hugely well-regarded web host, with a rabid fan base and glowing reviews — something especially noticeable in an industry full of fed-up (and vocal) customers. Along with DreamHost and Bluehost, SiteGround is one of WordPress’s three recommended web hosts. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, managed WordPress hosting is built into all of its shared hosting plans — something InMotion considers an upgrade. If your site uses WordPress, this is absolutely a perk: automatic updates, streamlined security, and expert technical support that are all just part of the package.

SiteGround is widely considered to be a technology leader, particularly in the shared hosting space where all hosts are duking it out for business. Its servers are ultra fast and extra secure, and SiteGround is constantly deploying new updates and technology to keep them that way.

While all its shared hosting plans are powerful, SiteGround is especially well-known for its highest-tier shared plan, GoGeek, which is suped up with tools developers will find especially useful, including a staging server and Git repo creation. Lots of small business and personal websites will probably find this overkill, but if your needs are more complex than the basics, SiteGround has a lot to love.

That said, once you blow through SiteGround’s introductory pricing (you choose contracts for one, two, or three years) your plan’s price triples: its lowest tier of shared hosting jumps from $4/month to $12 and its highest tier jumps from $12/month to $26. That doesn’t feel great. It also has the shortest trial period of all our top picks: only 30 days.

InMotion may not look flashy, but it’s a solid web host with truly excellent technology, a wide assortment of plans, and a legion of longtime customers. Its massive self-help knowledge base is the industry standard, and customer support is among the best. Don’t believe it? Try for yourself. InMotion’s 90-day free trial period for shared hosting is one of the longest around, second only to DreamHost’s 97-day trial.

There’s not a lot of hierarchy in InMotion’s plans. Upgrading from its lowest-tier shared plan, Launch, to Power or to Pro doesn’t unlock access to lots more slick tools or free add-ons. Upgrading is simply designed to accommodate websites that require more oomph — not to upsell. It’s a straightforward approach we like, especially for small businesses and websites that aren’t overly complex.

InMotion regularly runs promo pricing, with deals that start as low as $4/month. Normal pricing for shared hosting bumps up to $8–$9/month after the initial contract is up.

Like SiteGround, DreamHost is one of WordPress’s three recommended hosts, and includes managed WordPress hosting in its basic shared plans (it also offers a managed plan with more bells and whistles called DreamPress). Like InMotion, it has an industry-leading free trial period — a full 97-day money-back guarantee — and transparent pricing that doesn’t increase after your initial contract. It’s the best of both worlds.

DreamHost is notable for being completely customized, skipping the customary cPanel that SiteGround, InMotion, and so many other web hosts use for a control panel it’s built and tailored in-house. Think of it a little like Apple versus Android: Dreamhost customers love it, but it’s not universally compatible should you ever migrate to or from a different host.

In addition to shared hosting and managed WordPress hosting, Dreamhost offers upgrades to VPS and cloud hosting, as well as dedicated servers.

Two other popular web hosts to consider

Bluehost and HostGatorare both hugely popular web hosts that rank highly in tech publications like PCMag and CNET. There are good reasons why. HostGator has month-to-month contracts available on all its plans, the option to purchase a dedicated IP address, plus Windows-based servers — a little less common than Linux. Bluehost’s shared hosting plans all have some sort of built-in managed WordPress hosting features, and its offers contracts as long as five years, which will score you some really low prices.

But user reviews for both providers don’t line up with those industry publication rankings. User reviews always need to be taken with a grain of salt (was someone just having a bad day?) but from a 30,000-foot view, we’re not convinced their customer service can compete. If you want to try them out anyway, both offer money-back guarantees — 45 days for HostGator’s and 30 days for Bluehost.

A hosting service we don’t recommend

We recommend avoiding GoDaddy. It has a nice variety of plans and price points, but truly abysmal user ratings. They make sense: Its support documentation is all over the place, and customer service verges on laughable — phone wait times are long, chat is only available during certain hours, and it doesn’t offer any email support at all. You can absolutely do better.

How to Find the Best Web Hosting Provider for You

First, get a handle on what you actually need from your web host

The first thing to understand is how much web hosting your site or sites need to function well, without paying for what you don’t need. It starts with a game of Match the Specs.

Knowing your site’s stats (or what you predict your site’s stats will be) before you start comparing options and offers will help prevent that upsold-at-the-register feeling. Here are the basic ones to know:

Storage: How many gigabytes of space does your website need?

Number of sites: How many domains are you looking to host?

Bandwidth: How many visitors do you get in a month? Do you plan on any high-volume traffic surges (for example, from a viral blog post, a big PR push, Black Friday)

Supported technology: What programs, features, and apps does your site use (for example Perl, Joomla, a shopping cart)? What operating system is your website compatible with?

Match what you need with what each host offers, and try not to get too distracted by the stuff a host offers that you aren’t going to use — Bluehost isn’t a better host than DreamHost because it supports Drupal if you’re never going to use Drupal.

At the shared hosting level — the most common and where most websites start out — all six providers we looked at are fairly tit for tat: two or three tiers of plans with a variety of perks, functionality, and resources that increase with each tier. Unless there are specific conditions you’re trying to meet (you really do need that Drupal, for instances) at a pure specs point of view, we think you’ll be happy with any of them.

What stands out?

1. SiteGround’s plans appear quite a bit smaller than the competition, ranging from 10GB–30GB of storage and approximately 10K–100K monthly visitors, compared to 100GB of storage for GoDaddy’s lowest tier, and unlimited storage and bandwidth on most of the rest. Don’t let that dissuade you, especially if you like the rest of what SiteGround’s got going for it. For lots of websites, 10–30GB is plenty, especially sites that aren’t streaming or hosting gigantic media files.

What does unlimited and unmetered mean?

Many web hosts advertise “unlimited” or “unmetered” bandwidth and storage on their plans, which means there are no set thresholds for the amount of resources your website is allowed to use at any given time. But, as Hostgator puts it, “unlimited doesn’t mean infinite.” If you’re negatively impacting the other sites on your server, every web host in the world will throttle your usage and/or suspend your account until you optimize your site or upgrade to a higher plan. Most let you know you’re exceeding your usage with an email a day or two before they take action.

Even though this sounds alarming, most websites will likely never experience this. (Bluehost claims that 99.95 percent of its 2 million websites stay within “normal” usage.)

2. SiteGround, DreamHost, and Bluehost all include some kind of managed WordPress hosting into their shared hosting plans, instead of considering it an upgrade. (SiteGround also includes managed Joomla hosting in its shared hosting packages.) It’s not all that surprising: These are the three web hosts WordPress recommends to its many millions of users, and it tracks that they would prioritize those users needs into their core offerings.

WordPress will absolutely work seamlessly on all shared web hosting plans, managed or not. With managed hosting, though, everything is designed with WordPress in mind: it comes pre-installed, core updates happen automatically, customer support has more specific expertise. If you like the sound of that, you may want to skip shared hosting altogether and shop for managed WordPress hosting instead.

3. Most web hosts run Linux on their servers. If your website requires a Windows operating system, Hostgator and GoDaddy are your two options from these six.

Then, put customer service to the test

Beyond any basic “does my website have what it needs to function well,” customer support is the single most important thing a web host can offer. Think of it like health insurance. It doesn’t matter how robust the policy is. If the claims process is a nightmare, you’re going to switch providers.

Customer support can be split into live support — phone calls, help desk emails, and chat — and knowledge centers, which include everything from help articles to tutorials to community forums to blogs. Both live and self-help support are vital for when you’re having issues in set-up or performance.

When it comes to a knowledge center, you want a catalog that’s well-organized and easy to search, with a huge library of hyper-specific content. Bonus points for active moderators who are answering questions.

What stands out?

1. Out of our six hosts, InMotion’s support center is the one to beat. It has a gigantic database of detailed articles, tutorials, videos, and FAQs, plus a well-moderated community forum. If something doesn’t make sense, keep on scrolling: InMotion support staff is present in every comments section with advice, recommendations, and clarification — the only one of our six providers to do so.

2. SiteGround and DreamHost also have great resources that are complete, informative, and intuitively organized. Even though the quality of the content in HostGator’s support is rich, it looks looks like it was designed in the mid-90s and never updated.

As for live support, your priorities are fast access and nuanced, specific help from people who know what they’re talking about. That’s tricky to evaluate without being a long-term customer.

One way is to get a sense of a web host’s reputation, particularly over the past two years (all six of our web hosts have been around since at least the early 2000s — lots has happened since then).

What stands out?

1. SiteGround is overwhelmingly the crowd favorite out of the six hosts we looked at. It’s the de facto recommendation of Redditusers, and hugely well-regarded everywhere else: like we mentioned, it’s one of only three web hosts recommended by WordPress (DreamHost and Bluehost are the others), and has over twice as many five-star user reviews as any other provider on WhoIsHostingThis.

2. If you start reading user reviews, you’ll notice how many are focused on customer support. This is especially apparent with Bluehost, HostGator, and GoDaddy, whose products rank high with industry publications like CNET and PCMag, but who are ravaged by customers unhappy with the the support they’re provided.

But the true test of support quality is to experience it yourself, and that’s where free trials come in. All six hosts have some sort of money-back guarantee on their shared hosting plans, which means you can set up your website and see what you think of the service with relatively low stakes — just your time and any add-on fees you opt into, like paying for domain registration. We recommend going to town with customer support during that trial period. Get on live chat, open tickets, hop on the phone as much as possible to see if you like what you’re being served up.

What stands out?

1. DreamHost and InMotion are the real leaders of the money-back guarantee, with 97- and 90-day free trial periods respectively. These are the best you’re going to find from any web host, anywhere, and give you a lot of time to test out customer support, tools, and functionality. HostGator comes in second with a 45-day trial. Every other host offers a nice-to-have but swift 30 days.

2. SiteGround, InMotion, and Bluehost put a lot of resources into their support channels, with 24/7 access across phone, live chat, and email.

3. You have to pay money to speak on the phone with someone from DreamHost: $10 for one callback, or you can purchase packages of three callbacks for $15.

Try not to worry about uptime too much

Beyond customer service, the most common complaint you’ll read from customer reviews is about uptime – or rather, lack thereof. Uptime is vital to your business: in 2013, Amazon.com famously went offline for 40 minutes and lost $4.8 million.

Every single web host in the world strives to have 100 percent server uptime, but there’s unfortunately no industry standard to evaluate how well they do. Lots of web hosting review sites do personal tests to try and gauge server performance, including WhoIsHostingThis and Web Hosting Facts, but since these tests only look at one site at a time, and often for short amounts of time, they are best used as indications, not gospel. That said, all six of our web host sites perform well in these micro tests, with reported uptimes over 99.9 percent.

To try to avoid the “just trust us” promise of near-perfect uptime, most hosts provide some sort of guarantee of at least 99.9 percent uptime. However, that guarantee isn’t much of a guarantee. It just means your bill can be discounted in the event of any unplanned downtime. There’s a lot of fine print on these guarantees, too, including not accepting self-reported or third-party uptime data, and not providing refunds for downtime that was out of the host’s control (for example, a hurricane).

What stands out?

1. Bluehost is one of the only host to offer no uptime guarantee, and instead just says most of its downtime issues are resolved in 15 minutes.

2. SiteGround zooms out to view uptime annually instead of monthly, like most everyone else. If your average annual uptime is below 99.9 percent, you get one month of free hosting. SiteGround is also the most transparent when it comes to its uptime, and lists both its cumulative 12-month uptime and the previous month’s uptime right on its site.

3. DreamHost zooms in to view uptime hourly. For every hour of service interruption below 100 percent uptime, you get a day of free hosting (capped at 10 percent of your bill). The caveat: money back is only eligible when you manually flag that you think your service is sub-par. DreamHost doesn’t track it automatically.

Migrations matter, especially if your website already exists

Frustrating support and downtime — particularly when they’re combined — are the most common reasons to abandon one host and join another.

It’s always possible (and free) to migrate your existing site manually to a new web host (another reason those knowledge bases are so critical). But it gets more challenging the bigger and more complicated your site is, which is why web hosts often provide some sort of “managed” migration to ensure it’s done right.

What stands out?

1. InMotion’s managed migration policy is the most generous: three are free, and then it’s just $10 per transfer after that.

2. The oddest policy is Bluehost’s, which requires you to purchase five managed migrations at a time for $150. The economics aren’t so bad if you have five sites to migrate — less so if you only have one or two.

3. DreamHost is also unique insomuch as it is the only host out of the these six that doesn’t use cPanel, but rather its own custom control panel. Transferring an existing site in and out of DreamHost is always going to be a manual process managed by you. The exception is WordPress sites, whose migration DreamHost will manage for a whopping $99 each.

What’s cPanel?

Your control panel is the everything-in-one-place dashboard you use to manage your web hosting, whether its opening help tickets or installing a new app onto your site. cPanel is the most common “brand” of control panel and works with Linux operating systems. (The most common one you’ll see with Windows-based operating systems in Plesk.)

Every web host can customize its cPanel to look and act a certain way, but all cPanels are compatible with each other — think Android on your phone or tablet. DreamHost is more like Apple, in that it has built its own control panel that’s only compatible with itself.

Other web hosting specs to look for

Backups: It’s best practice to manually backup all your files and databases and store them on separate machines — we consider it one of the top 4 content areas you should worry about. But lots of web hosts advertise complementary backups to act as a kind of auto-save in case you corrupt a file, delete something vital, or otherwise break your website.

SiteGround’s backup policy is the beefiest and most integrated as a feature. It automatically backs everything up every day. For its mid- and highest-tiered plans, restoring those backups is free; the lowest-tiered plan is $20 per restore. GoDaddy offers a similar service, but for $2/month.

Everyone else treats automatic backups and restores as worst-case scenarios: Somehow you’ve wiped out your entire website and you forgot to make any manual copies.

Bluehost offers complementary daily backups and free restores across all its plans, but it caveats that it is at Bluehost’s discretion and in no way guaranteed. For more dependable website backups, it offers an add-on service called CodeGuard that provides daily backups and restores. CodeGuard is included for free in its highest-tier shared hosting plan.

With InMotion, only sites under 10GB are automatically backed up; you can restore a backup for free once every four months, or pay $40.

Likewise, HostGator only automatically backs up your site if it’s under 20GB. Getting a copy and support to restore will put you out $25.

DreamHost does a daily backup that’s kept for a week or two; support will help you restore your site for free if you somehow wipe everything out.

SSD storage: Solid State Drive technology is notably faster than regular “spinning” hard drives, which in turn means content is delivered to your website and your website’s visitors faster. It’s pretty common among well-known web hosts to include SSD storage in even lower-tier shared hosting plans. GoDaddy is the only one of the six hosts we looked at that doesn’t offer it on its basic shared hosting. You have to spring for its managed WordPress hosting to get SSD storage.

SSL certificates: Certificates for Secure Sockets Layer encryption (SSL) are like internet passports that confirm your website is secure enough for your visitors to submit sensitive data, like credit card information and passwords. It’s considered best practice to have SSL certification — in fact, Google considers it as a factor in how your site will show up in search rankings.

Most web hosts include basic SSL certificates for free in their shared hosting plans (although GoDaddy only offers it with its highest-tier shared hosting plan). That basic SSL certificate should be enough for most websites. More advanced encryption is needed if your website is also connected with a physical presence, like a brick and mortar store. Those suped-up SSL certificates are available for purchase through all web hosts.

SSH access: Secure Shell access means you have a secure channel straight into your account to manage files and databases. It’s a feature that’s critical if you’re have a web developer or technically-inclined site administrator who wants to manage and troubleshoot everything themselves. All six web hosts provide SSH access.

Email hosting: If your web host includes email hosting, it means you’ll have access to a customized email address and room to store your emails. Lots of web hosts offer this, often for free. SiteGround, InMotion, BlueHost, and GoDaddy include unlimited email hosting on their lowest-tier shared plans; all six hosts include it on their highest-tier plans.

It’s worth keeping in mind that email isn’t stored in a separate place — it all pulls from the same server space as the rest of your site, which means it will impact how much room is “left over” for you to use. If that doesn’t sound ideal — maybe your website is already pretty weighty — your web host isn’t your only option for getting a custom email address. GSuite (aka GMail for businesses) and services like Hover also provide email, and often it’s a more robust, more intuitive solution, like what you’re used to with your personal email. Lots of small business owners prefer keeping their email and websites on separate hosts: if your web host is also your email host and it goes offline, you’ll be without access to email. Quelle horreur.

Look for room to grow long-term

A typical upgrade pattern for a new website is to start with shared hosting, max that out, and then jump to VPS, cloud, or dedicated. WordPress websites might take a pit stop in Managed WordPress hosting for awhile, too — which, depending on the host, could be on a VPS server (like Bluehost) or cloud server (like DreamHost and HostGator).

It’s time to upgrade when your site’s size and traffic over-burden your current plan. Sometimes, the host will let you know it’s time to upgrade — that will happen if you’re, say, overwhelming a server and making everyone else’s sites on that server slow down. Another reason to upgrade is if you’re ready for more functionality, customizability, and autonomy: upgrading usually gets you access to a more robust toolkit.

What stands out?

1. SiteGround is unique in that it leaps from shared hosting straight to cloud, without the traditional VPS onramp.

2. InMotion is a little less modern than its competition by not offering some sort of cloud hosting solution.

3. GoDaddy has created another stepping stone between shared hosting and full-blown VPS with something called “business hosting” — basically the power of VPS with the straight-forward cPanel interface of shared hosting.

Not sure what all the different types of web hosting are? Here’s a breakdown:

An easy analogy is homes – GoDaddy has a nice little illustration of this. Shared hosting is like an apartment complex. One big building (the server) hosts lots of different residents (websites), who share the building’s resources (storage, bandwidth, often an IP address). This is an excellent solution for a lot of small and midsize websites, but the downside is if someone on the server hogs too much of the resources, it impacts everyone – imagine sharing the basement laundry with another resident who wants to wash all their sheets and towels and clothes every day. Web hosts offer a range of shared hosting plans. The higher the tier, the “nicer” the apartment building: fewer residents, more washing machines.

A virtual private server (VPS) is more comparable to a townhouse — you’re still sharing a building with other residents, but far fewer than in a shared hosting apartment building. Plus you get more flexibility and control over your space. That’s because the server makes virtual copies of itself, and each resident gets its own copy: you get your own IP address, private access, your own washing machine.

Dedicated hosting is like a house and there’s only one resident: your website. A dedicated server is designed to accommodate huge traffic — you can do all the laundry you want! — and requires a fair amount of upkeep that you or your webmaster is on the hook for. That lawn isn’t going to mow itself.

Not every web hosting service offers cloud hosting — it’s the newest form — but think of it as owning multiple residences. If there’s a problem at one of your servers, your website will instantly go stay at one of the others. In theory, your website will never go offline.

Lastly: WordPress hosting. WordPress is the most common CMS available. As such, most web hosting providers offer managed WordPress hosting, where the plan is designed with WordPress as its primary consideration: WordPress comes pre-installed, WordPress core updates are automatically applied, your server’s security might be more specifically tailored to what WordPress prefers.

This isn’t to say other hosting plans aren’t good for WordPress. They are all designed to be seamlessly compatible. But think of managed WordPress hosting like a yard service: it’s going to water your lawn and trim the hedges automatically.

Always pay for domain privacy

If you’re creating a new website, you’ll need to register a domain. All six web hosts allow you to register with them (sometimes for free, sometimes for a fee) even though it’s not required — you can register a domain with Namecheap or GoDaddy and still be hosted by SiteGround or InMotion.

When you’re purchasing that domain, always opt into domain privacy, which means proxy contact information from the domain administrator will be submitted to the WHOIS registry. If you don’t opt in, you will be spammed. A lot. Domain privacy usually runs $1–2/month and is billed annually.

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Nearly every email marketing platform promises the same thing: great deliverability, intuitive tools, designer-quality templates, and useful reporting so you can make the most of every email you send.

We looked at the best email marketing services and found that yes, they do all reliably deliver email, make it easy to manage your massive lists, and make sending emails more intuitive. But they’re not all the same. These are our four recommendations and how they stack up.

Hands down the most intuitive way to edit emails and automation chains

A nice visual flow builder that's half the price of ConvertKit

The forever free plan includes beautiful templates that are easy to use

The only email marketing service with real-time collaboration à la Google Docs

Starting price

$29 / month

$15 / month

Free

Free

Free trial

Unlimited

14 days

30 days

Up to 200 emails / day

Cost for 5,000 subscribers

$79 / month

$45 / month

$40 / month

$10 / month for 30,000 emails

Drag-and-drop email builder

✘

Visual workflow builder

✘

✘

Landing pages

✘

The 4 Top Email Marketing Platforms

If you’re a more advanced user — maybe you’re already dreaming of your complex automated email workflows and your robust tagging system — check out ConvertKit. Its workflow builder is the easiest to use, not only letting you visually map out your emails sends, but also editing the emails in those flows seamlessly. Instead of clicking back and forth between editing your workflow and editing each email one-by-one, you can edit them all from one space: the workflow simply slides to the side when you edit an email and slides back out when you’re done. It’s our most expensive top pick, but if you’re living in this software, it’s very much worth it.

Don’t have a big budget, but love the idea of a visual workflow builder and a robust tagging system? Consider GetResponse. Its workflow tool is easy to use, just not as amazingly intuitive as ConvertKit’s. At half the price, though, it might be worth the tradeoff.

If you’re new to email marketing, Mailchimp is a great place to start. Its templates are knock-out gorgeous. There’s helpful just-in-time information at every step. And just about all of its reporting, testing, and tools are free on the Forever Free plan. You’ll get up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails a month at that price. When you grow too big to stay free, it won’t be painful: Mailchimp’s pricing is competitive.

Finally, Mailjet: the Google Docs of email marketing services. Astonishingly, it’s the only option we found with real-time collaboration. We’ve lived in a world where design and copy and merchandising and a dozen more people are sending feedback to one sole email marketer like it’s 1999. Get everyone in the same email builder and collaborate. You’ll need to sign up for the Premium plan to access to this feature. If you choose Mailjet, we recommend the upgrade.

ConvertKit’s product is hands-down the best in its class. It’s intuitive in a way that we didn’t even know to ask for — like the game-changing way of the iPhone touchscreen. We won’t be surprised if more platforms start to copy ConvertKit.

How’s it so great? Updating the emails in a flow is phenomenally simple. You’re always working in the visual automator flow chart. Click into any email and the flow chart slides to the side. Edit the email, then click on any other email to edit that one. You can seamlessly move from one email to the next and save them all at once.

Imagine, for example, that you have an automated flow to sign up for a webinar and you’ve changed the price or the date of the webinar. You’d like to change it throughout the entire email sequence. This method makes it simple to move from email to email within the sequence without using a bunch of tabs, or trying to remember where you left off.

If that alone wasn’t enough to win it our crown, ConvertKit’s tagging system is impressively robust and operates as its segmentation functionality. Instead of grouping your subscribers into multiple lists (where you’ll get double charged by most services), with ConvertKit, you have one list and many tags. You can manually tag subscribers with just about anything, and auto tag them based on source, link clinks, and purchases through integrations. Use those tags to target your emails to particular customers, or use conditional content tags to show or hide different pieces of information to subscribers within each email.

Here’s an example: You’re a skydiving instructor. You use your list to sell skydives with customers and potential customers, and run a Conquer Your Fears email course to get new leads. You also use your list to up-sell existing customers multi-packs of skydives, and you offer a six-week 40-skydive instructor training course.

As we discussed in The Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation, your job is to long-term guide each of your customers through the different points of your conversion funnel. The people who’ve signed up for the Conquer Your Fears challenge are not the same as the ones interested in the training course. You need a more complex system of tagging and segmentation. You need ConvertKit (or GetResponse, depending on your budget). You’ll be able to tag each of your subscribers with the number of skydives they’ve done — based either on purchasing from your web-store, or by clicking a link in an intro email.

ConvertKit is not the best email marketing service for everyone.

We appreciate ConvertKit’s honesty in its blogpost 5 Reasons you should not switch from MailChimp to ConvertKit. Even though ConvertKit is our favorite email service provider, we totally agree! If you want beautiful, drag-and-drop email templates, you should stick with MailChimp. ConvertKit doesn’t have them.

ConvertKit only has three “templates” and they’re about as simple as an email you’d send to a friend.

ConvertKit highly encourages text emails that create the feeling that you just opened Gmail and sent a note. So, it only comes pre-loaded with three email templates: text-only, classic, and modern. The difference? Text-only has no pictures; classic and modern have pictures. Classic uses a serif font; modern uses a non-serif font. That’s it folks. There are no fancy email templates, no GIFs, no header images.

The best way to market online is to teach, to regularly deliver valuable content to your audience so that they will trust you and eventually want to purchase from you. So when you send an email, what part of the communication delivers the most value?

That’s right, the content. So we should be stripping away everything else that isn’t necessary in order to focus on the content. Multi-column layouts, background images, logos, and all the other nonsense that typically fills marketing emails doesn’t deliver value to the recipient. Instead it is all about you, the sender. Flip that around and start delivering value.
— ConvertKit Founder and CEO Nathan Barry

And, ConvertKit isn’t free. Even on its lowest plan, you’ll be paying $29 a month (or $24 if you pay annually up front) — which is still $29 or $24 more than you’d pay to get started with MailChimp. There is a 14-day ConvertKit free trial, but you’ll be paying up front, no matter how successful (or unsuccessful) you are at building a list of subscribers.

If you don’t have a list yet, you might want to start with MailChimp. And if you have one list, and plan to send to them all the same thing, MailChimp will serve you well.

Other ConvertKit features to note

Pricing: Monthly pricing is based on number of subscribers. All plans include visual workflow and unlimited emails.

The best things about GetResponse are its visual flow builder (a less powerful version of ConvertKit’s flowchart style that doesn’t integrate with its email editor) and its landing page integrations. If you’re going to be doing any webinar marketing, these landing pages are already set up for you to crush it. And GetResponse probably won’t blow through your budget as fast, either.

“I’ve seen the workflow builder in action, and it is one of the more impressive click-and-drag interfaces on offer, yet it is extremely easy to use.” — Stewart Rogers in VentureBeat

GetResponse has the most complex pricing structure of our top picks. With MailChimp and ConvertKit, your price increases as your subscribers increase, but you aren’t necessarily unlocking a bunch of features or tools — you already had access to most of them. With GetResponse you pay based on the number of subscribers you have and the level of service you want: Email, Pro, Max, or Enterprise.

Subscribers

Email

Pro

Max

Enterprise

1,000

$15

$49

$165

$1,199+

2,500

$25

5,000

$45

10,000

$65

$75

25,000

$145

$165

$255

50,000

$250

$280

$370

100,000

$450

$490

$580

100,000+

--

--

--

1 user

3 users

5 users

10 users

Monthly prices listed. Sign up for an annual plan to save 18%. If you go opt for two years, you’ll save 30%. No refunds if you cancel early.

Other GetResponse Features to Note

Landing pages: GetResponse offers “basic” and “advanced” landing pages, but we think the names should actually be “very limited” and “unlimited.” If you stick with the Email plan, you’ll get “basic” which hosts one landing page with up to 1,000 visitors a month. The advanced option allows you to build an unlimited number of landing pages with an unlimited number of visitors, and do A/B testing on them. If you know you’re going to be using landing pages, sign up for the Pro plan. If you’re not sure, start with the Email plan.

A/B testing: You can test up to five messages varying the following fields: subject line, send time, from field, content.

If you’re looking for a free or freemium product, Mailchimp is the place to start. (You probably already knew that. As FastCompany says, Mailchimp is probably the biggest name in the freemium category.) You get access to almost all of Mailchimp’s features without dropping in any credit card information. Once you outgrow the free plan, you can upgrade easily.

It’s also an easy starting place for beginners. To Mailchimp, you’re not sending an email, you’re having an interaction with your recipient: It’s not an abandoned cart, it’s a show of deep interest in a product and an opportunity to capture their interest! As you scroll and build your interactions, Mailchimp acts like a cheery, helpful workbook with with pro tips, best practices, and optimization advice waiting for you on every page. (And it’s good stuff you’ll recognize from How to Write Marketing Emails That Get Results.) Don’t just send a receipt, MailChimp says, send some suggestions for other products they may want to add to their order! We concur.

The interactions you create will be beautiful. Mailchimp’s pre-made templates are beauties ready for images, GIFs, designed headers, the works. Its drag-and-drop tool isn’t necessarily impressive, but it certainly isn’t hard to use, and allows for simple customizations. Add a module, delete one, edit one, or swap the order.

Other Mailchimp Features to Note

Pricing: Free is free forever (up to 2,000 subscribers or 12,000 emails a month). When you get bigger or start sending more email, you’ll need to upgrade. You can pay per email or per subscriber.

Segmentation: We aren’t very impressed with Mailchimp’s ability to segment, tag, or build workflows. Mailchimp comes with a bunch of pre-built segments you can use from the get-go: New / Active / Inactive subscribers, Potential / Recent / First-time / Repeat / Lapsed customers, Male / Female, Under 35 / Over 35. If you have a basic account, you can use up to five conditions to do simple list filtering, but not combine logic. You’ll need Pro to do that — then you’ll get access to complex and flexible list filtering with unlimited conditions.

A/B testing: You can test up to 3 variations (or if you go Pro, up to 8 multivariate combinations): subject lines, content, from names, and send times. There are lots of helpful notes throughout setup, like suggesting you send to 5,000 recipients per variant for significance. Right above that, it notes how many recipients you currently have. This is the kind of easy-to-get-it-right support Mailchimp serves up throughout its platform.

If there are a lot of cooks in your email marketing kitchen — we’ve run campaigns that needed buy-in or comments from design, branding, copy, merchandising, PR, legal, and more! — then Mailjet Premium is going to be a game-changer.

Instead of funneling all email campaign changes through one person, emailing out a preview, and having that same person make all of the changes, everyone can hop into Mailjet and collaborate. Make comments, make changes, and even lock down sections that are already approved. Track changes and restore old versions whenever you’d like to rewind. Worried about letting loose the power of email sends to everyone? Add a “publication request” and automatically require manager sign-off before anything gets launched. It’s the stuff Google Docs has conditioned us to expect — and Mailjet is the only service that offers this option. For this reason, we recommend Mailjet for larger marketing and branding teams.

If it’s just you working on an email campaign, real-time collaboration won’t matter at all, and we think you’d be just as happy with Mailchimp. There’s nothing else super special about Mailjet on its Free and Basic plans: you get access to drag-and-drop email templates and 24/7 support. Opt for Basic and Mailjet will drop its branding. Every Mailjet plan allows you to have unlimited contacts. Want to add a million people to your list? Go for it. You’ll only be limited by the number of emails you can send in a day or a month. On its free plan, that’s just 200 a day. (It’s really more of a trial than a plan in our book.)

Other Mailjet Features to Note

Pricing:

Emails / month

Free

Basic

Premium

6,000

$0

$10

$21

30,000

--

60,000

--

$19

$42

150,000

--

$69

$97

450,000

--

$167

$230

900,000

--

$334

$399

Reporting: Real-time dashboard with opens and clicks, sorted by contact or by email provider

A/B testing: Mailjet says, “You can test everything!” and it’s true in a way. You can pit up to 10 different emails head-to-head, testing things like the light blue header with the orange CTA button versus the the light blue header with the green CTA button — and both of those options with different CTA texts.

Mailjet Customer Support

Documentation is a little bare bones. There are a few questions briefly and directly answered, but nothing feels “just-in-time.” You’ll need to think of what to ask (for example: What is a good open rate?) then click over into the help section (where the interface ages 20 years) and read a pretty plain answer.

But having a huge list of subscribers is useless if you don’t know how to manage your content. If you are sending the same campaigns to everyone on your list, I bet your results aren’t that favorable.

People on your email list shouldn’t be grouped into one category.

Why?

For starters, these people are very different. In addition to their demographic differences, your subscribers will have separate wants and needs.

It’s unlikely you’ll be able to run an email campaign relevant to everyone on your subscriber list.

Irrelevant content is the second most common reason why people unsubscribe from email lists.

You worked hard to get them to sign up, but all of that will be thrown away as soon as they unsubscribe. You need to avoid that.

Email segmentation is a must if you want to deliver relevant marketing content to your subscribers.

If you’ve never segmented your email lists or your current segmentation methods need improvement, you’ve come to the right place. I’ll explain what you need to do to elevate your email marketing strategy with segmentation tactics.

Encourage your customers to create profiles

Often, businesses don’t segment their email lists because they simply don’t have enough information to do so.

How can you segment your subscribers if the only piece of information you have about them is their email addresses? Email addresses alone won’t be enough.

That’s why you should encourage your customers to create profiles on your website.

You’ll use these profiles to improve their shopping experience. With profiles, they can store their payment information and billing addresses, manage their order histories, etc.

But these customer profiles will benefit your segmentation strategy as well.

You’ll get more information about each customer. And you can use that information to segment your lists accordingly.

That said, customer profiles shouldn’t be a requirement.

Some ecommerce shops force customers to create profiles just to buy something. I strongly advise against this strategy.

In a perfect world, yes, they’ll create profiles. But you don’t want to lose conversions because of this.

Instead, try to give them a reason to sign up. Here’s an example from the Lululemon website:

As you can see, the site lists the benefits of creating a customer profile.

No hard sell or any pressure to do so. People who create a profile will benefit from:

tracking orders and returns

stored payment information

favorite products

customized shopping experience

When the customer creates a profile, you’ll collect more information about them. We’ll talk more about what type of info you should be asking for as we continue through this guide.

Don’t ask for too much information right away

If people want to sign up to receive emails from your company, they shouldn’t have to submit a blood sample to do so.

Obviously, I’m exaggerating here. But you’d be surprised at the number of form fields some brands require when a customer signs up for email content.

I understand the reasoning behind this.

The more information you get from your customers, the easier it will be to segment them into different categories. However, if you ask for too much, it will turn people away from signing up in the first place.

Why should they trust you with personal information that’s, in their opinion, irrelevant to their shopping experience? They just won’t sign up.

Plus, you can still come up with effective segmented lists with just a few form fields.

In addition to asking for a website visitor’s email address, Champs also requires them to give their first name. While this won’t necessarily help them segment their subscribers, it will help them personalize their messages.

With the information on this list, Champs can segment new subscribers based on:

age

gender

location

That’s plenty. You can create multiple lists with just those three pieces of information.

For example, one group could be females between the ages of 18 and 25 living in New England.

The content they receive would be significantly different from a group of men between the ages of 35 and 50 living in southern California.

Limit the form fields on your opt-in page. There’s no reason for you to know their favorite color or mother’s maiden name.

The more information required to sign up, the fewer people will subscribe.

Let your subscribers customize their content

Another way to deliver relevant marketing content is by asking your subscribers what they want to receive.

If they can customize the type of emails you send, they won’t be surprised or annoyed when they get a message. Everything delivered to their inbox will be extremely relevant.

Set up these options through your customer profile settings, which I just talked about.

In addition to letting people customize their email content through their profiles, you can give them options on the types of content they want to receive when they initially sign up.

Lowe’s only asks for the customers’ email addresses and zip codes. They can use this to segment their audiences by location.

But look at how Lowe’s offers customizable email options.

By default, everything is checked. However, people can uncheck the types of content they find irrelevant.

For example, let’s say someone wants to receive only marketing promotions from this company.

Any time they got a message about home improvement tips or upcoming events, they would be annoyed. These newsletters are irrelevant to them.

They can opt out of those by simply unchecking the appropriate boxes when signing up in the first place.

Use the double opt-in strategy

When I work with other businesses, I see this problem all the time.

They have many subscribers on their email lists that don’t belong there. That’s because some people provided their email addresses without realizing what they were getting into.

To get more subscribers, some websites have a default setting during the checkout process to join their email lists.

But the customer doesn’t realize they’re going to get bombarded with marketing emails just because they wanted to buy something.

While I don’t have a problem with this strategy overall, it needs to be implemented with a double opt-in to complete the signup process.

Your content won’t be relevant if it’s being delivered to people who subscribed by accident. Double opt-ins help ensure that subscribers actually want to receive marketing messages from your business.

The easiest way to implement a double opt-in verification message is with a welcome email:

Once a new subscriber confirms they want to be on your email list, you can segment them based on the factors I previously discussed and will continue to cover moving forward.

If a customer doesn’t complete the process, don’t send them emails unless it’s related to their order.

Segment based on engagement

Another way to segment your subscribers is based on how they responded to previous emails you sent.

You should be tracking actions such as:

opens

clicks

conversions

Then, you can segment your subscribers accordingly based on their behavior.

For example, someone who never opened an email could potentially get a similar promotion in the future. Whereas a subscriber who already opened that message shouldn’t receive it again. It’s irrelevant to that person.

Segmenting based on engagement is another way to take advantage of your customer profiles, which I discussed earlier.

When someone browses on your website while logged in to their customer profile, you can access that information and segment them based on their browsing behavior, purchase history, and the frequency with which they visit your site.

Someone who is on your site weekly shouldn’t get an email saying “we miss you.”

That type of message is only relevant to subscribers who have been inactive for several months.

If you put all your customers into one group, you won’t make as much money from them. Here’s what I mean.

Your customers who spend the least amount of money shouldn’t be getting emailed about your most expensive products. Instead, send them promotions that entice them to spend a little bit more or shop more frequently.

Targeted emails based on this type of segmentation yield an average of an additional $14 in sales per subscriber.

Some of you may have nearly 10,000 or more subscribers on your email lists.

So do the math. These additional profits will add up quickly.

Send birthday emails

As we’ve seen throughout this guide, age is a great way to segment your subscribers for a number of reasons.

But you can do even more with that information if you have it.

It may sound cheesy, but sending birthday promotions to your subscribers can go a long way. You can take advantage of their birthdays more than just once a year.

Take a look at how The Hook Up uses this strategy to send an email on its subscribers’ half birthdays:

This personalized content is extremely relevant to the recipient.

It’s unique to each subscriber. Discounted dinner for being a half-year older? Sign me up.

You can even start birthday promotional messages early.

For example, let’s say your email lists are segmented by birthday months. Everyone who has a birthday in November can receive a message in October about getting ready for their birthday with a new pair of shoes or something along those lines.

Obviously, you’ll tailor the message accordingly based on your business, but you understand what I mean.

Start small

Right now, some of you might not be segmenting your subscribers at all. Don’t get overwhelmed and bite off more than you can chew when you start.

Research shows that half of businesses aren’t segmenting email lists. So you shouldn’t be too alarmed yet.

Don’t try to come up with dozens of different lists right away.

Start by trying to segment your existing subscribers. Send a poll to the people on your email list about their interests, and group them accordingly.

Change your current landing page to get more information from new subscribers.

You need to walk before you can run. Starting slow will help you make sure you get things right.

The last thing you want to do is put people on the wrong list. That strategy will backfire because your content will be more irrelevant to them than ever before.

Conclusion

Segmenting your subscribers is the key to email marketing success.

If you learn how to segment your customers accordingly, your marketing content will be more relevant. As a result, fewer people will unsubscribe from your list, and your email campaigns will be more profitable.

Encourage your customers to create a profile. Just don’t force them to give you too much personal information.

On sign-up, let your customers customize the type of content they want to receive.

Segment subscribers based on engagement, browsing history, and previous purchases.

Understand the difference between your B2C and B2B clients. Your B2B lists should be even more specific.

Group your customers based on spending habits.

If you’re new to email segmentation strategies, start small. Focus on the basics before you try more complex tactics.

Ultimately, this will help you deliver relevant marketing content to all your subscribers.

How is your brand segmenting subscribers on your email lists?

]]>https://www.quicksprout.com/2018/10/26/how-to-deliver-relevant-marketing-content-by-segmenting-your-email-subscribers/feed/22https://www.quicksprout.com/2018/10/26/how-to-deliver-relevant-marketing-content-by-segmenting-your-email-subscribers/How to Increase the Average Order Value for Your Ecommerce Storehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/9OB5aGxQIVY/
https://www.quicksprout.com/2018/10/24/how-to-increase-the-average-order-value-on-your-ecommerce-store/#commentsWed, 24 Oct 2018 15:00:30 +0000https://www.quicksprout.com/?p=41411[click to continue...]]]>As an ecommerce shop, you need to keep coming up with new ways to increase your revenue.

But it’s a common misconception that you need to find new customers to generate more sales. That’s not the case.

The total cost of the products in the cart is $22. But this total isn’t enough to be eligible for free shipping.

REI reminds its customers in two places on this page that orders over $50 ship free.

As a result, people will be more inclined to add additional items to their carts.

Why pay for shipping if you don’t have to?

Assuming the customer in this scenario took the bait, REI was able to increase the purchase amount of this transaction by more than double the initial value.

Upsell on the checkout page

The most successful ecommerce shops find ways to upsell to their customers right before they finalize the purchase.

However, you need to be careful if you decide to implement this strategy. Here’s why.

Upsells shouldn’t take away from the initial purchase intent.

By the time your customers reach your checkout page, they already added items to their carts and want to convert. Don’t let your upsell be a distraction that eventually hinders them from completing the purchase.

The buying process needs to be as fluid as possible, with minimal friction. So don’t make the upsell an extra step.

Let me show you a great example of an upsell from Jetties Bracelets that illustrates what I’m talking about:

Based on what the customer added to their shopping cart, the website automatically generated an upsell of other items frequently purchased together.

If the customer wants to add these upsells to their cart, all they need to do is click one button.

This takes the value of this order from $9 to $27.

As you can see, a simple upsell on the checkout page can triple the order amount. Just make sure it isn’t distracting or forced upon the customer.

You want them to convert even if they don’t go for the upsell.

Offer package discounts

Bundle or package discounts provide an incentive for customers to spend more money.

This promotion is valid on its ecommerce website as well as in its physical stores. If you have brick and mortar shops in addition to your ecommerce platform, you may want to consider a similar structure.

Once customers spend money, they receive Kohl’s cash in the form of a coupon.

These coupons are automatically stored in their customer profiles.

Kohl’s doesn’t have any limit on this spending. If a customer spends $1,000, they’ll get $200 in Kohl’s cash as a reward.

I know what some of you are thinking. If the cash back eventually gets redeemed, wouldn’t it lower the average order value of those future purchases?

Not necessarily. It’s unlikely that people will spend only the amount of their reward on those future purchases. Plus, you can set expiration dates for the cash back rewards, which is what Kohl’s does. There’s a chance not all of these rewards will be used.

There are some common problems I see all the time when I’m analyzing these landing pages. It’s a tricky situation for businesses.

On the one hand, you want your pricing page to be informative, useful, and beneficial to your prospective customers. But at the same time, you want to make sure it’s designed to make people spend as much money as possible.

All too often, I see pricing pages that are either on one end of the spectrum or the other. You need to find that middle ground.

What types of pricing pages will encourage website visitors to convert?

Pages that are transparent and build trust will ultimately be your best bet. Here’s why.

If your pricing page is honest and doesn’t withhold any information from prospective customers, you can still implement tactics that encourage people to spend more money.

In fact, 73% of consumers are willing to pay more for products and services that promise complete transparency. Furthermore, 39% of consumers say they’re willing to switch brands to pursue transparency.

Both you and the customer will benefit from trustworthy and transparent pricing pages.

Create a comparison table

The best way to show customers their options is by displaying a comparison table.

This makes it easy for them to make a decision without having to navigate to different pages or do too much scrolling. Ideally, your comparison table can be displayed on one screen.

Here’s an example of how Netflix uses this strategy on its pricing page:

As you can see, this is an extremely simple yet effective design.

Netflix offers three different subscriptions:

basic

standard

premium

The first line of the table shows the price. It’s obvious and transparent how much each option will cost. There are no surprises or secrets here.

After that, it lists seven features. The comparison table shows whether each price point has the listed feature.

This is the perfect size for a comparison table.

According to research on short-term memory, the brain can store only about seven items at a time. Most adults have the capacity to store five to nine pieces of information in their short-term memory bank.

If your comparison table has 30 lines, you’ll need to cut that down significantly.

It’s just too much for people to process, and you’ll struggle to get conversions.

Plus, if they have to keep scrolling to see information, it’ll be difficult for them to keep track of which option is the most appealing to them.

If you don’t know how to shorten your comparison table, here’s what I recommend. Only include line items that are different for each price point.

For example, if all your options come with a 30-day free trial, don’t add that to your table. Instead, find another spot on your pricing page to showcase that feature.

Here’s a look at how Constant Contact displays these benefits on its pricing page:

The platform offers a 60-day free trial.

Nothing says trust and transparency like the offer of two free months. This gives customers a chance to get to know the software without having to pay for anything. It shows that this company stands behind its product.

Constant Contact also gives its customers the option to cancel any time. It doesn’t make anyone commit to long-term contracts, and it doesn’t charge cancelation fees.

In addition to the 60-day trial period, Constant Contact will refund customers 100% of their payments if they cancel within 30 days of signing up.

The company guarantees satisfaction.

As you continue to scroll down this page, you’ll find the pricing options. But the website visitor is already primed to convert after reviewing the company’s value proposition.

If your value proposition isn’t on your pricing page, you need to put it there right away.

This will help you build trust with your customers and increase their chances of converting.

Highlight the top option

Tell your customers what to buy.

There are a few different ways to approach this.

If you look at the Netflix comparison table above, you’ll see the highlighted top choice. The premium service was red, while the other options were grey. The red color jumps out at the customer more than grey.

Plus, the premium subscription was the most expensive. Obviously, you want your customers to spend as much money as possible.

I know what some of you are thinking. Is this strategy trust-building?

Yes. Your most expensive option will likely still be the most beneficial to your customers.

Continuing with the Netflix example, spending the most money gives people the option for ultra HD and the ability to stream videos on four devices simultaneously. These features aren’t available with the other subscriptions.

Let’s take a look at another example. GoDaddy highlighted its top option by referring to it as the best value:

Obviously, everyone wants a bargain.

As you can see, the best value choice is also the most expensive. But again, this gives its customers the most bang for their buck.

But your top option doesn’t always have to be your most expensive.

A great way to get your customers to convert is by putting your top option next to a choice that’s significantly more expensive. This will make it look even more appealing.

You can also entice consumers to select a certain option by telling them it’s your best seller or most popular choice.

When customers in a grocery store had the option to sample six flavors of a product, the conversion rate was 30%. However, when they had the choice to sample 24 flavors of the same product, only 3% converted.

Another study found that decreasing the availability of product choices resulted in a 10% increase in revenue.

Limiting choices also helps build trust and transparency. It shows people that everything your company has to offer can be found in just a few different options. They won’t have to sift through dozens of choices to find what they’re looking for.

The note encourages visitors of the page to write a message if they need help understanding any of the pricing options.

In addition to the live chat function, HubSpot also includes its phone number on the page.

This adds more credibility to the website and improves its customer service.

Having both live chat and phone support available will appeal to a wider range of customers based on their preferences for customer service communication.

Justify your pricing

Depending on your business, some of you may have high prices for your services.

If your most expensive option is only $5 per month, you may not need to justify that price. However, if you’re charging hundreds or thousands of dollars for your products or services, some justification may be necessary.

This is important for B2B companies.

Unlike the average consumer, businesses need to see a return on their investments. Spending money on your service is an investment for them.

I know what some of you are thinking. How can you make money by just giving away your products?

Let’s review an example to show you what I mean. Here’s a look at how Lander used this strategy on a recent Instagram post:

The company is giving away a smart lantern, power bank, phone case, and lightning cable.

Doing this increases the exposure of its page. It gives people a reason to follow its profile and engage with the brand.

As you can see, this giveaway is a bit different from the ones you may have seen in the past. Lander partnered with other brands to sponsor this giveaway.

Again, this strategy will drive more users to its page. These other accounts will post information about the giveaway and direct users to follow Lander’s profile to win.

Here’s a look at the caption from one of the other accounts it partnered with:

There are plenty of other ways to get creative with this marketing tactic.

Instead of giving away items at random to your followers simply for liking a post and following your account, you could run a more structured contest that requires skill.

Contests that encourage user-generated content are the most effective.

To enter, ask your followers to upload a picture and tag your brand. This strategy will expose your company to anyone who follows the users who enter.

If someone sees that their friend is promoting a brand, they’ll be more inclined to follow your profile and potentially enter the contest as well.

Now that you’ve got these users interested in your products, you can use other strategies to get them to buy. Even if they didn’t win the contest, the product you were giving away is still on their minds.

2. Take advantage of the “swipe up” feature

The swipe up feature is a game-changer for businesses.

For years, you probably had some trouble getting users on Instagram to navigate to your website from a specific link. You would post content and then direct people to click a link in your bio.

But that strategy has lots of faults.

First, it’s an extra step for the user. They have to navigate to your profile page and then make another click.

People don’t want to go through that hassle.

Plus, what if you want to promote two different landing pages? Or maybe three? or four?

You will not have multiple links in your bio. That’s too confusing.

The swipe up feature eliminates this problem. Now you can use your Instagram story to drive traffic directly to specific landing pages.

Here are a couple of examples:

Once your business profile reaches 10k followers, you’ll have access to this feature.

Just promote a product or service on your story, and add the swipe up function with a link to a landing page about your promotion.

If you’re advertising a specific product, a logical landing page would be to the product description on your site. There, the user can look at additional photos and add the product to their shopping cart.

These lead magnets are a great way for you to drive more traffic to your website and ultimately increase conversions.

3. Use shoppable posts

If you have an ecommerce brand, you need to take advantage of shoppable posts.

This strategy allows you to sell products directly through the Instagram platform.

The reason why I love this feature so much is because it increases the chances of getting your current and prospective customers to buy something. Here’s why.

Display your contact information. Make it easy for people to reach you with any questions, comments, or concerns.

Secure the checkout process. Get rid of ads for other brands on your site. Promote your hassle-free return policy.

If you do things like that, people will trust your business. Once they trust you, they’ll be more willing to buy.

Create FOMO

Fear is a powerful emotion.

I’m not saying you need to scare your customers, although that can be an effective strategy as well.

For example, let’s say your company sells home alarm systems. You could run a video ad showing the results of a robbery.

The camera can show a missing TV that was ripped off the wall, furniture displaced and flipped over, a broken window, drawers pulled out of a dresser. Maybe even show a child’s bedroom turned upside down.

This ad might make people without an alarm system feel afraid that this could happen to them. So they buy an alarm from your company.

However, this type of tactic isn’t reasonable for every business.

Let’s say you sell clothing. It wouldn’t make sense to run an ad scaring people into buying a t-shirt.

Instead, you can create FOMO—the fear of missing out.

Here’s an example of the way Expedia uses this strategy to sell hotel reservations through its platform:

This method is used all over this page.

The first hotel listing states that four other people booked a room at this hotel in the past 48 hours.

Plus, a separate alert states the hotel is in high demand. Only two rooms are left at $135 per night.

As a result, the consumer might feel afraid that if they don’t book the room now, the rate will go up, or the hotel will potentially sell out of rooms.

Expedia doesn’t stop there. When you click on a property to get more details, the FOMO strategy continues:

The platform already told you there are only two rooms left.

But now you find out there are 14 other people viewing this property right now.

This makes the consumer think they need to act even faster to secure the advertised rate.

You can apply the same tactic on your ecommerce website. Put up an alert telling people there is a limited number of a certain product remaining.

I’m not advocating lying to your customers, but nobody will know what you have left in stock. Do what you want with that information.

Identify the desires of your customers

Desire is a strong emotion as well.

Just like you and I, your customers have wants and needs. If you identify what they desire, you can use that to reach them through your marketing campaigns.

So they ran this ad to inform people how tobacco products can cause diseases leading to death. The idea here is that it’s more common than people think.

Someone may not realize the harm they’re doing to their bodies by consuming certain products.

However, after seeing a shocking ad like this, they may reconsider their actions. As a result, they could reach out to the organization and seek whatever services they’re offering to help them quit the bad habit.

That said, shock doesn’t always have to be associated with fear.

You can shock people with exciting and encouraging news as well.

Inspire your customers

Sometimes, you just need to give people a bit of motivation to accomplish something.

By triggering emotions that inspire consumers, you can encourage them to make a purchase.

This powerful image on the Nike’s website shows what the slogan looks like in real life.

Football is a difficult sport for anyone to play. For someone with only one good arm, it may seem like a crazy dream.

Nike explains that it’s only a crazy dream until you do it, and they have proof to back it up.

Is this content telling people across the globe they can play football with one arm? No.

It’s there to inspire people.

No matter what you think is holding you back, you can accomplish it.

Do you think you’re too overweight to go to the gym? Are you too old to run a marathon?

Whatever you need to overcome, an ad like this can inspire you to do it. Once people feel inspired, they’ll need to buy the right products to help them reach their goals. And that could be your product.

Build anticipation

Anticipation can drive us crazy.

We’ve all been there. Waiting by the phone for a certain call. Sitting in front of the TV anticipating a new episode of your favorite show to start.

Waiting to hear the results of a test.

Once anticipation builds, you can get your customers to buy something.

If you can stimulate these emotions properly, consumers will respond by making purchases.

How are you driving sales by leveraging the emotions of your customers?

]]>https://www.quicksprout.com/2018/10/17/how-to-generate-sales-by-triggering-an-emotional-response-from-your-customers/feed/31https://www.quicksprout.com/2018/10/17/how-to-generate-sales-by-triggering-an-emotional-response-from-your-customers/How to Use A/B Testing to Experiment with These 13 Elements of Your Websitehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/U1LdPW1gFpE/
https://www.quicksprout.com/2018/10/15/how-to-use-a-b-testing-to-experiment-with-these-13-elements-of-your-website/#commentsMon, 15 Oct 2018 15:00:56 +0000https://www.quicksprout.com/?p=41366[click to continue...]]]>You’ve done a great job of finding new ways to drive more traffic to your website. But if that traffic isn’t translating into conversions, you’ve still got plenty of work to do.

I see this common misconception in my consulting work all the time.

Businesses spend much time and effort trying to improve their organic SEO while simultaneously running PPC campaigns to get more website visitors.

There’s nothing wrong with this strategy, but increasing site traffic isn’t the only metric that matters. You also need to focus on how visitors behave after landing on your pages.

But simply not charging for shipping isn’t enough. You need to display this information proudly on your website.

This way your customers won’t have to get to the checkout page to know that shipping is free.

But where do you tell them? That’s for you to find out through A/B testing.

Try different locations on the banner of your website. Maybe include it in the headline.

After you experiment with the placement, you can continue to run tests on the size, font, and color of this text as well. Try using all capital letters, or add an exclamation point to see if these variations change your results.

4. CTA phrasing

Let’s get back to discussing the CTA button.

Now that you know the optimal size of this button from a test I talked about earlier, you can start to experiment with the phrasing.

Obviously, the phrasing will depend on your goal. For example, a “buy now” CTA won’t make sense if you’re trying to get website visitors to subscribe to your email list.

Here’s an example from a landing page that targets visitors who need a loan:

The team tested “apply now” against “submit.” Everything else about the pages was exactly the same.

The hypothesis here was that the word “apply” implied that the visitor could be rejected from a loan, which would discourage them from converting.

On the flip side, the “submit” button makes it seem like anyone can be approved simply by filling out the form field above.

I highly recommend experimenting with CTA button phrasing on each landing page of your website. This button is too important for you to overlook.

5. Pricing display

Some websites don’t display their prices on their landing pages. Do you?

Depending on the type of business you have, your branding strategy, and the industry you’re in, you may not think this is necessary.

However, it’s possible that displaying your prices could help increase conversions. Check out this example below:

Adding the price to this landing page increased its conversions by 100%.

After adding the price, you can also run other tests to make sure it’s optimized on the page. Change the location, color, font, and size to ensure you’re getting the maximum number of conversions.